A common way to display merchandise in a retail store is to hang the merchandise from a vertical wall. Much merchandise comes packaged in such a way so as to allow it to be hung from hooks mounted in a peg board or a slotted wall.
The hooks protrude from the wall. A common type of hook utilizes a single piece of heavy wire that protrudes out (generally horizontally) from the wall. The merchandise is hung from this piece of wire.
An improvement to this single hook is a scanner hook. A scanner hook has a second piece of heavy duty wire that extends parallel to and above the first piece of wire. At the end of the second piece of wire is a plate for receiving a label beating information on pricing and product identification. The plate also provides some protection against puncture wounds that can be caused by the end of the first piece of wire.
Others in the prior art have modified the hook in order to provide for a tag that is capable of beating pricing and product information. For example, in Boas, U.S. Pat. No. 5,088,606, the hook has been redesigned in order to accommodate the tag. Such hooks are costly to produce and complicated to use.
The retail industry prefers to use a type of hook known as a butterfly hook (so named because the slot formed in the merchandise resembles a cross-section of a butterfly) or a double loop hook. A butterfly hook has two parallel wires extending out from the vertical wall. The two wires are in the same generally horizontal plane. The ends of the wires are joined together with a cross piece, thereby reducing the risk of injury to shoppers. Such a hook is shown in Banse U.S. Pat. No. 3,200,960.
It is desirable to provide information on pricing and product identification on such a butterfly hook.