Barcodes Turn 35

On Friday June 26, 1974, a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, sold a pack of Wrigley’s Juicyfruit gum, one small purchase for a consumer, but one big leap for retailers! The pack of gum was the first retail item to be sold with an official UPC (universal product code) and a scanner. It was a day that would forever change the way that POS was done and soon after, barcodes could be found everywhere.

While barcodes were in developmental stages years before this historic sale, prior to the barcode, there was no universal system for assigning products a unique identifier. Each company had its own way of doing things, which lead to an error rate of approximately 1/300 characters, as opposed to 1/36,000,000,000,000 with barcode scanners.

Today, 35 years after its initiation, UPC’s are scanned more than 10 billion times a day, across 25 different industries. Because of this, the advent of the barcode produced significant economic and productivity benefits for shoppers, retailers, and manufacturers alike.

Those looking to celebrate the barcode’s 35th birthday may enjoy Melina McLean’s history of barcodes where she reports that before barcodes were ever dreamed up, grocers often discussed how they needed some way to track their merchandise. Then, in 1948, Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel, overheard a conversation between the dean and the president of a large food chain. While the dean turned down the president’s request for a graduate student project involving automated checkout, Silver mentioned the conversation to his friend, Norman Woodland. For the rest of the story, click here. And take a look at the site that Motorola’s put together in honor of the celebration here.

Sources:

http://www.barcode.com/2009/06/happy-35th-birthday-to-the-barcode/
http://www.barcode.com/2009/01/history-of-barcodes/
http://business.motorola.com/barcodescanners/35years/index.html