The first product to be purchased using the now-ubiquitous UPC (Universal Product Code) was a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum. This happened in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio in 1974. Beginning in the late 1940s, people tried to figure out how to construct a system for product identification. According to a legend and later an obituary in the New York Times, in Miami in 1948, a Manhattan Project scientist named Joseph Woodland was thinking about the problem while looking at the sand on the beach. He drew a few concentric circles in the sand and the resulting bullseye inspired his solution to the product identification problem. 25 years later, scientist George Laurer represented IBM in competing with 13 other firms to transform a symbol to a string of numbers that would not only tell a computer what product they belong to, but also tell the computer the price of the product. The rules were that the design had to take up as little space on the product’s packaging as possible and it also had to be scannable from any angle. The scanner also had to work at up to one foot away from the product. In the end, the design from IBM’s George Laurer was chosen and since then, the design has remained largely the same.
The spread of the UPC into mainstream use was initially very limited due to the computer technology of the 1970s being quite rudimentary compared to subsequent decades. However, scanners improved and were gradually able to read smudged codes and produce, meat, and cheese eventually began to be marked with barcodes. By 1980, no less than 90% of all grocery products were marked with the UPC, but productivity initially increased slowly because the technology was expensive and trying to train employees on how to use barcodes added another item to many a store manager’s lists of daily to-dos. Nevertheless, as time passed, and barcodes became more integrated into retail culture, the advantages became more apparent and according to one researcher, stores selling products marked with barcodes had an average annual savings of $28. George Laurer’s UPC design later led to scanners on mobile phones and subsequently QR codes and to machines that automatically sort parcels at Post Offices, labor productivity increases aside.
Bibliography: