There have been too many times that I was in a store and found something I was interested in that had no price on it.  I would look for the nearest “price check scanner” and wonder when the “big box” stores were going to get high tech scanners right on all their wagons.  After I thought about that, I wondered how much more additional information could be provided by the scanner. 

Well, as seen in Home Depot commercials now, the future I thought about may be closer than I dreamed.  In the Home Depot commercials, a customer uses her smartphone to scan a plant’s bar code.  The scan sends information to the smartphone and the customer can learn how much light or water the plant needs.

The bar code technology allows the stores to provide reams of data from product reviews to customer ratings to “if you like this, you might like …” One could easily envision, price comparisons and recipes for that fruit or vegetable that is healthy but you find difficult to get your kids to eat.  For the DIY crowd, the stores can offer how-to primers via the word or video.  The opportunities to enrich the customer experience by helping them with immediate at your fingertips information seem endless.

The Home Depot bar code test pilot is just the beginning and other big boxes like Lowe’s are trying to figure out the best way to engage customers.  Lowe’s has built a mobile version of its Web site to enable customers to access information in the store and they are testing Microsoft tag technology for mobile scanning and informing. 

So far, 25 million people in the U.S. have the ability to scan with their mobile phones and the number is expected to grow dramatically.   Bar code technology could be a boon for customers but also for the retailers and suppliers.  Hopefully they will use the information they can gain from tracking the customers’ behaviors to give the consumer what they want, when and how they want it.  How’s that for a competitive advantage?