The bar code turns 35 years old
Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/1/2009
1974: President Gerald Ford was in the White House; John Rutherford amid energy crisis protesters won the Indy 500; "The Godfather, Part II" received the Best Picture Oscar, the Oakland A's beat the Dodgers in the World Series, and on June 3, the Universal Product Code bar code symbol was born.
The 35th anniversary of the Universal Product Code (UPC) was recently celebrated by GS1 US (www.gs1us.org), the developer and administrator of the UPC for more than 200,000 businesses in the United States.
One of the world's best-known symbols, the UPC comprises a row of 59 machine-readable black and white bars and 12 human-readable digits. Both the bars and the digits convey the same information: the identity of a specific product and its manufacturer.
Originally developed to help supermarkets speed up checkout, the first live use of a UPC took place in a Marsh Supermarkets store in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974, when a cashier scanned a package of Wrigley's gum. It ushered in extraordinary economic and productivity gains for shoppers, retailers and manufacturers, with estimated annual cost savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone.
Replacing individual price-labeling with the UPC resulted in faster, more accurate checkouts, saving consumers time and money. Shelves were replenished more quickly, and stores were able to increase the frequency and variety of sales incentives. It also simplified product returns and rebates.
The UPC was quickly adopted by other industries looking to capture the benefits. Today, UPCs are scanned more than 10 billion times a day in applications spanning more than 25 industries, including consumer packaged goods, apparel, hardware, food services, healthcare, logistics, government and high-tech.
"The UPC made the modern retail store possible," says Rodney McMullen, vice chairman of The Kroger Co., which operates more than 4,000 stores under different banners or names. "It allows us to carry tens of thousands of items in a given store and move shoppers through quickly while offering them many different ways to save money."
Integral to the UPC's success is its flexibility—usable on myriad surfaces—and the foresight of the people who designed it with the capacity to identify millions of unique items. Although the range of its use was not envisioned in 1974, when supermarkets carried a fraction of the inventory they carry today, the UPC accommodates the creation each year of thousands of new products.
"Industry would not be as efficient without the UPC," says Sandy Douglas, president of Coca-Cola North America, and chairman of the GS1 US Board of Governors. "The UPC provides a basis for the industry to track products from production to shelf, to move products between companies, and to get products to shoppers quickly."
The UPC is equally important to small entrepreneurs, who sell their products through large retailers, which require the bar code for both sales and recall purposes. Every UPC incorporates three elements: the brand owner's GS1 company prefix, the specific item's reference number, and a check digit, which is calculated by the combination of the preceding numbers and ensures data accuracy.
"The UPC really is fundamental to commerce," says Bob Carpenter, chief executive officer of GS1 US. "It took time to build momentum, but it has succeeded because it benefits everyone: consumers, retailers and manufacturers. And it has a lot of life left in it."
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