I was at the garden center at Lowe’s home improvement store yesterday and noticed the image above right at the entrance. The whole piece was about 11 in x 17 in. so the Quick Response (QR) code was about 8 x 8. The code once scanned takes you to m.bonnieplants.com. Bonnie plants is the major nursery for this Lowes location. The site if you don’t have the time to visit gives you a bunch of information on plants to choose, recipes, info for new gardeners and more. This is a great example of how smart phones and modern technology are getting you more information right away.
If you are not familiar with the QR codes they are a newer type of barcode that holds much more information than traditional barcodes. Traditional barcodes hold 13 characters or numbers. Where QR codes hold up to 1024 charaters. This gives you enough information to encode web site urls or phone numbers or other information that you may want to disseminate. UPS uses a form of this for package tracking.
Many mobile devices including iPod touch, iPhone and Android phones have apps that will read these codes and give you a readout of the encoded data or link you the web site if it is encoded.
The advantages of this is that now suppliers can save money on huge brochures or POP materials and link a customer to a web site to get more information like installation instructions, videos and image galleries. This helps the supplier become more environmentally conscious as less paper and materials are used to create the information the consumer needs. As well the consumer gets all the information they need accessible at the touch of a screen. The information does not become dated as new products come out because as we all know a web page is easier to update than it is to reprint 50,000 brochures.
It will be interesting going forward as to how many others join this trend in the retail environment. Keep your eyes open and if have seen this in other locations please leave them in the comments.
