With the new Google phone, the G1 Android, a retail shopper can learn if the product he or she is about to purchase at the store can be bought for less at another nearby store (or online). The phone has available no less than 2 free applications currently available that find the best prices for a product in online stores and nearby offline stores using the information from the product’s barcode that a user scans using the phone’s camera.
Here’s the IM from retailers to Google: “Thanks a lot . . . Not.”
In this story, a couple at a T-Mobile retail outlet who are about to buy a Google phone charger for their car learn they can get the same product elsewhere for less. What are the implications? Can retail shops compete on price with online stores with little overhead? Is there any way this new age ‘price check’ technology wil go away or not be adopted?
Whatever the case, I just want to say again that those barcodes, which for so many years have been seen as at best utilitarian, are now providing some very handy things indeed. This flattening of location vs cost is what the internet did for a major swath of businesses — the end of the “brick and mortar” model — and now barcodes are doing it to what’s left.
Filed under: Bar code, C-Level Issues, GS1, Light news
