Complex Numbers

Cracking the Code

I vaguely remember a time before these things became ubiquitous.

    The Shockingly Relevant History of the Barcode  
Mired in consumer protests, legislative battles, and nearly devastating setbacks, the pioneering technology provides a roadmap for others to survive—and even thrive.

Sadly, "barcode" doesn't refer to a way to get the best deals at drinking establishments.

The hype about new technologies often follows a predictable pattern. We’re told a new technology is about to change the world, and then it’s often labeled a failure when it doesn’t make an immediate impact. Take Google Glass, which promised a bold and slightly dorky vision of the future—but ultimately failed in embarrassing fashion.

Oh, that was nothing compared to the rise and fall (pun intended) of the Segway.

However, some of the most successful technologies in the world followed that same pattern but survived what the research firm Gartner calls the “trough of disillusionment,” and people tend to eventually forget about those initial struggles. Few examples illustrate that pattern more clearly than the modern barcode, a technology that celebrated its 50th birthday in 2023.

In reality, it could only have "celebrated" it if it were sentient. Is it?

Before barcodes became so embedded in our lives that we barely noticed them, they went through a dramatic “trough of disillusionment” filled with major consumer protests, legislative hearings, and moments of near-catastrophic failure.

I also vaguely remember the controversy, the most idiotic of which involved invocations of "Mark of the Beast."

On June 26, 1974, the first UPC barcode was scanned on a pack of Wrigley’s gum at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio.

Yes, a milestone to etch into the monuments of history, right next to the Wright flight and Apollo 11.

Despite years of consulting with various stakeholders, the ad hoc committee had neglected one group in particular: consumers.

And? They never consulted consumers before, and hardly ever did again. See also: New Coke.

The major controversy about barcode adoption focused on an issue that might seem a bit strange in retrospect: item-level pricing. Before barcodes, every item in a grocery store had a price tag. Tagging each item required significant labor, and one of the primary reasons grocery stores developed the UPC barcode was to remove the labor costs required by item-level pricing and instead put product prices on shelves.

Grocery stores might actually be profitable if they didn't have to pay those pesky employees. See also: self-checkout (a technology that, obviously, relies heavily on barcodes).

Early barcodes and computerized checkout systems were massively expensive and cost roughly $250,000 per store to install.

Which, if my memory of 1970s prices and wages is correct (it probably isn't), could have paid the salaries of 10 employees for 10 years, or 1 employee for 100 years.

Barcodes survived the struggles of the 1970s. Consumer backlash mostly disappeared by the turn of the decade, likely in part because Tucker-Foreman—who had become the national face of the protests—left her job as the head of the CFA to become the assistant secretary of agriculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

You might need to read the article for the context on that, but basically, the main opponent of barcodes up and joined the enemy.

As for my own experience, I was just a kid then and didn't do much grocery shopping. Mostly, I remember the issue of Mad that poked fun at barcodes. It was from 1978, and it looked like this.   (I hope that works. If not, just do an image search on "mad magazine barcode cover."

Speaking of comics, though, the barcode backlash extended at least into the 1990s there. Comics publishers such as Marvel and DC printed two covers for a while: one with a barcode and another with a box that would normally contain a barcode, which usually sported some action superhero in silhouette. The latter were shipped to direct sales outlets (comics shops) while the former hit racks at newsstands and grocery stores.

So, I guess, you could always tell who was the serious comics collector from that era: the one with all the non-UPC rectangular cutouts on the covers.

Lately, of course, the ubiquity of the UPC barcode has been supplanted by the even more ubiquitous QR square, which helpfully leads smartphone users to malware.

But the UPC code has one great benefit for me: I like to keep track of what beers I drink, and it's easier to use my beer-tracking app to scan the barcode than to search all the different possible permutations of the beer's name.

And that's why barcodes are actually awesome.