Barcodes Have Rocked Modern Commerce

Go to any grocery store and pick up an item, turn it over, and you will see a barcode. Barcodes are small symbolic patterns that relay information about the identity of a product. For the most part, these tiny archives go unnoticed, but they have become critical in the business world. Early use of the barcode involved labeling railroad cars, but the barcode's true commercial niche was in automating supermarket checkout systems.

Now, barcoding is implemented by the US Post Office, The Department of Defense, and just about every industrial application you can think of. In 1948 Bernard Silver began research into a system that could automatically read product information. Together with Joseph Woodland, the first workable system was developed using ultraviolet ink. The second system, developed by Woodland, was based on Morse Code.

He extended the dots and dashes of the code into narrow or wide vertical lines read by shining a 500-watt bulb through the paper onto an RCA935 photomultiplier tube. Later, a bulls-eye pattern was used so that scanning would work in either direction. By 1949, pioneers Woodland and Silver applied for US Patent 2,612,994 called Classifying Apparatus and Method.

At first, barcode scanning was unreliable and expensive as it required investments from large corporations willing to test the technology's potential. In 1952 RCA purchased the patent. In 1961 The Boston and Maine Railroads tested the system on gravel cars until 1967, when the Associated American Railroads AAR selected it as the standard used across the entire North American fleet. One year before that The National Association of Food Chains met to discuss the idea of using barcodes to automate checkout lines.

It was the Kroger chain who first volunteered to test the system based on the bulls-eye code. And by 1969, Computer Identics; a company formed by David Collins of the Pennsylvania Railroad, installed the first two systems at General Motors in Pontiac, Michigan and The General Trading Company in Carlstadt, New Jersey. These, among other initial financiers allowed barcode use to prove itself as viable, but the most common use for this technology is in the grocery and retail industry. It helps businesses to improve trade efficiency and as a result, the economy.

In the mid 1970s the NAFC developed an 11 digit code to identify any product, and the Universal Product Code UPC was born. Since then, industry has not been the same. By 1980, barcode systems were being implemented by 8000 new stores per year. Did barcode technology revolutionize business and industry?

Consider how vital UPC codes are in point-of-sale management. Fast selling items can be easily identified and reordered, while slow selling items can be determined, preventing build up of unwanted stock. This ideology also allows the most popular items to occupy the optimal spaces within the store, which further increases sales, and historical data allows the accurate prediction of seasonal fluctuations in product demand. Barcodes have rocked our modern world.