This week marks 50 years since commerce met the barcode, a visual symbol whose impact on business has been far more than symbolic. It all started with a red flash in an Ohio supermarket on June 26, 1974, when a pack of Juicy Fruit gum became the first grocery item ever to be scanned via barcode.
The beep heard ’round the world ushered in a new era of streamlined transactions and inventory management that made modern retail efficient. Officially called the Universal Product Code (UPC), the barcode allows stores to carry thousands of products and quickly identify them in their digital systems.
The barcode’s genius lies in its ability to encode information with simplistic elegance. The lines of varying width correspond to numbers, forming a 12-digit code that signifies the product’s name and manufacturer. A laser scanner detects how light is absorbed into the black lines on a white background and conveys the information to a computer.
Using scannable lines to encode information was a concept first devised by engineers Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, who patented the tech in 1949. But their brainchild didn’t gain traction until after the invention of the laser for easy scanning. In 1971, grocery chains assembled a committee to find a compact, printable symbol that the industry could widely adopt to speed up the checkout process.
IBM proposed the rectangular barcode we know today, which quickly became a global industry standard. In the decades that followed, the barcode enabled inventories to swell to thousands of items as stores eliminated physical price tags and manual records.
Despite its ubiquity, the barcode is at risk of being made obsolete by its more sophisticated cousin: the QR code. This 2D code can convey the item’s place of origin, ingredients, and expiration date and even lead to an associated website.
As we celebrate the barcode’s 50th birthday, we look to the future where new technologies like RFID chips and object-recognition AI may one day render scannable symbols a nostalgic relic.