So at first all I was gonna do was post this image and let the “initiated” do their thing. But then I thought, screw that. Let’s explain.
So the above thingie is called a QR CODE. “QR” stands for “Quick Response.” They’re popping up in various places, even on T shirts. If you have one of those fancy cell phones, you SCAN IT with your phone’s built in camera barcode scanner.
For instance if you scan the above with your phone using any number of free scanner apps, it’ll open your phone’s browser and take you to launchday’s facebook page, where you can click “like” on your phone to keep in touch with us. (Which sort of reminds me of that scene from Christmas Story, where the cute little kid waits all month for his decoder ring, only to find out the secret message is “buy more ovaltine” or whatever the product was. Total letdown.)
Maybe In 10 years we’ll laugh and say ooohhh my goodness how hilarious we used to think qr codes were cooool as we fly around in our solar Toyota jetpacks and fashion our hair into ironic mullets. Or we’ll get tired of Romanian 9-year-olds using QR codes to install catastrophic viruses into our phones and qr codes will disappear forever.
But for the moment barcode and QR code scanning is some sort of shiny diversion for “fancy phone” users, bringing us right up into, oh, about 1973 or whenever barcodes got invented. If youre standing in a store, you can scan a barcode with your phone and it will tell you where you can get that item cheaper. Including online — so you can be standing in costco, scan that sofa, find the item cheaper on amazon, buy it on your phone, and go home. Yes that’s right you can now drive to Costco to shop at Amazon. And pay Amazon shipping in addition to the gas. It’s exhausting isn’t it. Or I guess you could have just gone to pricegrabber before driving to costco to scan the item to buy at Amazon and saved yourself the headache, but you would totally miss out on the $1.35 fruit smoothies at costco.
I’ve been plunking around with a free phone app called “ShopSavvy.” I can search for products by either typing the product in (yawn, typing, so old school, even with swype) or just scan that product’s barcode. Um, assuming I have the barcode. And that is a bit of a hilarious assumption, because if I already had it, why would I be …. nevermind. I’ve learned never to ask questions, and to just enjoy the smoothie.
