#122 1974 · US grocery industry · Retaillegibility
America's grocers agreed on one barcode and rebuilt retail around it
the problem
Every checkout typed in every price
background
Into the early 1970s, every grocery item was priced by hand: manufacturers or store clerks stuck a price sticker on each individual can and box, cashiers read and keyed every price at checkout, and a price change meant re-stickering the whole shelf. Inventory counts were periodic and manual, so nobody knew real-time stock and stores over-ordered to avoid empty shelves and still ran out.
The fix was obvious and had been tried piecemeal for years: put a machine-readable code on the package. But a code only pays off if it's on every product from every manufacturer and every scanner in every store can read it, and no single grocer, distributor, or vendor had the leverage to force that on everyone else — seven-plus rival symbologies sat unadopted while checkout costs kept climbing.
the move
In 1970, six grocery and manufacturer trade associations formed the Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code; its Symbol Selection Committee reviewed proposals from nine vendors and, after an MIT technical appraisal, chose IBM engineer George Laurer's rectangular Universal Product Code over RCA's more-established circular 'bullseye' symbol on March 30, 1973, betting on its lower smear-related error rate.
the payoff
On June 26, 1974, a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum became the first UPC-coded item scanned at retail, at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. Adoption took years afterward, since retailers had to buy scanners before the code paid off and neither side wanted to move first; a 1999 PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis put the UPC's ongoing annual savings to the grocery industry at roughly $17 billion.
what came after
The UPC became the substrate all of retail data was later built on — POS systems, loyalty programs, and modern inventory management all assume it. It was extended into the global GS1 barcode/GTIN system used outside North America, and RFID and 2D codes like QR are now layered on top rather than replacing it.
filed under
references
- [1]Pack of chewing gum becomes first-ever item scanned with a UPC barcodeHistory.com, 2024history.com
- [2]A History of the Bar CodeEH.net (Economic History Association), 2011eh.net