Opinion - News Analysis   

Bar code: a system that changed retailing

The design was straightforward — 59 black and white bars. And the inventors’ objectives were simple enough, too — to speed up the grocery checkout line and give supermarkets a new tool to track their stock. But the bar code has become much more than that since it was first used to read the price on a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum (67 cents) on the morning of June 26, 1974. Now they are used to board airplanes and track packages. Bar codes help people with diabetes calibrate glucose meters and researchers study the pollination habits of bees. They inspired a hand-held video game, Barcode Battler, in 1991.

They even played a role in the 1992 presidential race, when the elder George Bush, running for re-election against Bill Clinton, seemed at a campaign stop to be puzzled by what had long been a technological staple of everyday life.

Today, bar codes are scanned more than 10 billion times a day around the world. And after 35 years, they are both the mundane minutiae of modern life and cultural icons of cold efficiency, identification and control.

“It was cheap and it was needed,” said George J. Laurer, who was already a veteran engineer at IBM in 1970 when he was asked to lead a team assigned to devise a checkout system for grocery stores. “And it is reliable. Those three things probably contributed more than anything else.” Now 84 and retired, Laurer continues to be a cheerleader for his invention even as the bar code is challenged by newer and much more sophisticated competitors. Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is one such technology.

RFID uses the same technology as dashboard toll collectors and building access key cards and allows businesses to identify and track specific items without a direct line of sight. But even as big players like Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble have pushed ahead with the RFID technology, the cautious retail business, in particular, has pushed back, in part because of concerns about price.

Bar codes, after all, cost just half a cent each, while the electronic tags used in RFID cost more than 5 cents each. As a result, a significant portion of Wal-Mart’s suppliers rejected its mandate to adopt the newer technology.

Bar codes have evolved to respond to the competition. In recent years, two-dimensional matrices, which resemble jumbled checkerboards and carry much more information than bar codes, have come into use in Japan and have gained a foothold in America. Cell phones equipped with technology for scanning those patterns can read them and display bar codes that could, for instance, be used instead of a ticket for a concert or board a plane.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Pop’s most spectacular act
China’s push for health
Misapplying R2P in Sri Lanka
The greatest entertainer of his age
Many lenses: how the outside world saw the Iranian protests
Bar code: a system that changed retailing
2 new natural wonders put on World Heritage List
Corrections and clarifications
Death of a legend
Education reforms
Maharaja in doldrums

Copyright © 2009, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu