As you’re going through the checkout line at the supermarket, you might be thinking about the cost of the items you’re buying, whether you’ve forgotten anything on your shopping list, and where exactly you parked your car.
You're probably not thinking about the fact that all of the products in your shopping cart have barcodes (specifically, UPC codes) that enable them to be scanned for a price. It’s something we take for granted as shoppers these days, but barcodes didn’t exist until the 1970s. More precisely, it was at 8:01 am on June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, that a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum became the first item sold with a barcode.
Before the advent of barcodes, there was no easy way for store managers to keep track of how many items had been sold and how much stock was left. Prices were displayed on goods with stickers, and checkout cashiers manually typed these prices into the cash register.
In 1948, Drexel University graduate students Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland began working on the barcode system that we know today. After a variety of proposals for tracking inventory proved impractical, including the use of Morse code, they came up with the idea of using bull’s-eye patterns as barcodes, an idea that was eventually sold to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
Thanks to an IBM laser-reader system, barcodes became a reality in the supermarket industry, leading up to the first barcode-assisted purchase on a Spectra Physics Model A price scanner on June 26, 1974. The multi-pack of chewing gum (50 sticks total) cost 67 cents.
Over the past five decades, the use of barcode technology has helped retailers save an untold amount of time and money. And although there have been many further innovations in retail and inventory technology, the humble barcode seems likely to hang around for a long while yet.
Price check, please:
- Sylvania used a system of colored bars in the 1960s and 1970s to keep track of railroad freight cars, but the system, a predecessor of the barcode, didn't work very well.
- The first barcode scanner cost $4,000 USD back in 1974, which is equivalent to around $17,600 in today's currency. The entire checkout counter cost $10,000, or $44,000 today. These days, scanners are far more affordable, and cost just 1 percent of the 1974 price.
- Barcodes are used all over the world for various purposes, including many uses beyond retail goods. NASA has even used barcodes to monitor heat-shield tiles on its space shuttles.