{"id":80,"date":"2019-10-29T17:16:28","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T17:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/historyoftech.mcclurken.org\/barcode\/?page_id=80"},"modified":"2019-11-10T23:26:36","modified_gmt":"2019-11-10T23:26:36","slug":"cultural-impact","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/historyoftech.mcclurken.org\/barcode\/cultural-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultural Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Universal Product\nCode (UPC), or more commonly called, the barcode, has made such a huge impact\non consumer culture that most consumers alive today in the US don’t remember\nwhat shopping was like before barcodes became mainstream. \n\nBefore barcodes became the primary means of ringing up item prices,\nitems in stores were labelled with their own individual price stickers or their\nspot on the shelf was labelled with the price. At the counter, the cashier\nwould add up the prices of each of the items by entering the numbers into the\nmachine and the machine would give the total, and since bank cards were not\nwidely available until the 1980s, customers largely paid with cash. This would force\nthe customer to spend a considerable amount of time in the checkout line.\nHowever, customers did not have to carry much more cash then than they do now\ndue to the lower prices of the 1970s. Ever since the UPC became mainstream, the\ntime it takes for customers to get through the checkout line is reduced because\nthe work of counting up the prices is left up to the machine while the cashier\nsimply runs the item\u2019s barcode across a laser, which reads the pattern,\nidentifies the item to the computer, and adds its price to the total. \n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n