Fifty years ago at Marsh’s grocery store in Troy, a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum became the first retail item scanned through the black and white stripes of a Universal Product Code.
That historic retail transaction was the culmination of many different inventions coming together to create the modern point-of-sale system. The system used an NCR 255 computerized register combined with a laser scanner.
It was a monumental moment in time, said Brady Kress, president and CEO of Carillon Park.
“I’m sure there are folks out there who certainly remember having to plug in every single price on every single item, tallying it up. And companies like NCR had become really, really good at that. But here was a way to — oh my gosh — instantly scan something, and instantly remove it from someone’s inventory,” Kress said. “I think folks in the Dayton area can be proud of NCR and the folks that are here that we really did teach the world how to conduct business.”
The barcode became a great way for retailers to control inventory and reduce lines at the checkout.
The first barcode was an idea drawn in the sand. Literally.
A supermarket manager had approached the dean of the Drexel Institute of Technology looking for a way to get shoppers through his store more quickly. Drexel graduate and inventor Joe Woodland heard about the problem and decided to tackle it.
The inspiration came to Woodland while sitting in a deck chair on the beach in Miami. Woodland had learned Morse code in the Boy Scouts.
“I remember I was thinking about dots and dashes when I poked my four fingers into the sand and, for whatever reason—I didn’t know—I pulled my hand toward me and I had four lines. I said ‘Golly! Now I have four lines and they could be wide lines and narrow lines, instead of dots and dashes. Now I have a better chance of finding the doggone thing.’ Then, only seconds later, I took my four fingers—they were still in the sand—and I swept them round into a circle,” Woodland recalled in a Smithsonian article.
Woodland and his former classmate Bernard Silver, refined the concept and applied for a patent in 1949. That first barcode looked more like a bullseye.
In 1966, barcodes for grocery stores were still a holy grail of sorts. Kroger had put out a booklet that ended with "Just dreaming a little . . . could an optical scanner read the price and total the sale. . . . Faster service, more productive service is needed desperately. We solicit your help."
RCA (Radio Corporation of America) decided to pick up the gauntlet, and they set about trying to refine Woodland and Silver’s design for the grocery store.
The first trials were conducted at the Kroger Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati on July 3, 1972. RCA placed automated checkout stands and compared them with other Kroger stores. The evidence was overwhelming - the Kenwood store had superior sales figures compared to the others.
But the bullseye design tended to smear in the direction of the paper when running through the register.
It was George Lauer with IBM who finally developed the rectangular UPC code that we use today. His design had to meet the specifications stated by the Symbols Selection Committee.
The design had to be a maximum 1.5 inches and neat, be printable with existing technology and be readable from any direction at any speed.
To the delight of cashiers everywhere, in the 1980s many U.S. supermarkets adopted barcode scanning technology. Today the Universal Product Code (UPC) can be found on nearly every manufactured retail item.
