Cultural Impact

The Universal Product Code (UPC), or more commonly called, the barcode, has made such a huge impact on consumer culture that most consumers alive today in the US don’t remember what shopping was like before barcodes became mainstream. Before barcodes became the primary means of ringing up item prices, items in stores were labelled with their own individual price stickers or their spot on the shelf was labelled with the price. At the counter, the cashier would add up the prices of each of the items by entering the numbers into the machine and the machine would give the total, and since bank cards were not widely available until the 1980s, customers largely paid with cash. This would force the customer to spend a considerable amount of time in the checkout line. However, customers did not have to carry much more cash then than they do now due to the lower prices of the 1970s. Ever since the UPC became mainstream, the time it takes for customers to get through the checkout line is reduced because the work of counting up the prices is left up to the machine while the cashier simply runs the item’s barcode across a laser, which reads the pattern, identifies the item to the computer, and adds its price to the total.

The rise of barcodes in the retail industry coincides with the increasing power and availability of computer technology. Not only did the UPC allow for checkout to speed up, but it allowed retailers to keep extensive records of sales, and more efficiently than with manual record-keeping. “The potential was mind boggling. Not only could the system speed up the checkout lines but also it generated an ongoing record of sales. That meant they could control inventory more efficiently, monitor promotions, and even time how fast an employee moved the checkout line. In addition, because every item no longer needed a sticker, prices could easily change and individual customers with “loyalty cards” could even be tracked.”1 This means that the general retail experience is faster paced and speed-oriented in relation to how it was when our parents were growing up.

Bibliography:

The Unexpected Impact of the First Bar Code