Weird place. I think I have shopped there maybe once or twice but don’t even remember this being a thing.
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Hobby Lobby, well-known for being owned by Evangelical Christians, fears barcodes are the “mark of the beast,”
Oh, so they’re literally fucking insane.
I went looking for more articles about this and came across a Reddit thread where the top comment was:
I mean, the cynic in me says that any large business that does not do full inventory control is a front for money laundering.
Which would certainly be less insane than what The Hill claims is the true reason. Another comment said:
some xtians I’ve encountered in the workplace literally see the harder way to do something as more virtuous
Which definitely rings true (think: the kind of person who insists cashiers should stand up for…some reason).
Snopes marks the claim that it’s due to the mark of the beast as false, but reading their reasoning, this seems too strong a position to me. More accurate would be to say it’s not explicitly supported by evidence. Because the official reasoning that is given also feels really flimsy.
Human beings can’t read a bar code.
No shit. Human beings can’t read the random string of numbers you use currently, either.
A lot of our product comes from cottage industries in Asia that couldn’t mark their goods with bar codes if they tried.
Bullshit. You think other stores in your industry don’t get stuff from the same places?
Inventory control by computer is not as accurate as you think.
Ok? Can’t be worse than by hand.
Employees take more pride in their work when they know they are in charge, not some faceless machine.
This certainly sounds like the most believable part. Not that it’s true: this is exactly that fundie bullshit the Redditor I quoted above was talking about. But it’s believable that a fundie store might believe it to be true.
Customer service is better.
Everything I’ve read suggests the exact opposite.
The time savings at check-out is minimal — and easily squandered.
wtf does “squandered” mean, exactly? Be precise.
Reprogramming the computer for sales would take a huge effort in our case, because we put so many individual items on sale each week.
There’s no way POS software require reprogramming to enter in sales.
Twenty million dollars is a lot of money.
Not for a company with estimated annual revenue of $8 billion, it’s not.
I will say, doing things the hard way is virtuous. It makes you stronger, it makes you wiser and more flexible.
But that’s very different from doing things the stupid way. Putting weights on your arms to do laundry improves you. Doing laundry with vegetable oil instead of detergent is just being an idiot
I will say, doing things the hard way is virtuous.
This is not true in all cases. If you want to go from New York to Maine, traveling South until you loop around and come to Maine from the north isn’t somehow more virtuous.
There’s a distinct difference between doing something “the hard way” and adding unnecessary complications. “The hard way” is just a faster way of saying “without all the modern conveniences.” New York to Maine the hard way would be walking rather than driving.
The virtue in doing something the hard way is that it gives you a clearer look at the details. Walking from New York to Maine would give you a much more intimate understanding of the terrain than driving or flying.
That’s not inherently “virtuous”.
I don’t think we have a shared definition of virtuous, but I think it often depends on context. Taking longer to do something such that a deadline is missed and people suffer isn’t desirable.
I don’t think “the hard way is more virtuous” is defensible without adding so many exceptions and clarifications it’s not saying anything at all.
I’mma go with “its useful” to do things the hard way often enough to stay in-practice, as the hard way is both often a backup method and either the method newbies are trained on, or a differentiator between newbies who would rather let things slide when the easy way isn’t working, versus motivated people worth incentivizing.
Sometimes the incentive is “not having to attend remedial training”, sometimes its additional training and raise/promotion opportunities. Its worth remembering that today’s hard way was often the new, easier way in the past.
