WHETHER it’s a piece of pipe or new kitchen cabinets, many Americans search for the right product in the aisles of home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowe’s, trying to quickly identify what they need.
<—- In this Home Depot commercial, a customer scanned a bar code with her smartphone to get information about a plant’s preferred growing conditions.
The big-box stores are introducing some help to provide customers with immediate information for their buying decisions. They are adding bar codes to certain products that give potential buyers on-the-spot access to product reviews and ratings, how-to guides and videos.
This will gradually expand across a greater range of products in the thousands of stores across the country as the huge home improvement retailers, which have been hit by the poor economy, seek to prompt consumers to undertake repairs or renovations they have been delaying.
For now, garden plants sold at Home Depot and Lowe’s have bar codes on each plant tag that enable customers with smartphone scanners to check out whether the plant, for example, grows in low light or needs frequent watering.
This is the season when stores sell millions of garden plants, which are an important segment of the business. At Lowe’s, for example, nursery sales, which also include trees and flowers, were 4 percent of the chain’s total $48.8 billion sales in the fiscal year ended Jan. 28.
via Big-Box Home Improvement Stores Offer Bar-Code Guides to Plants – NYTimes.com.
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