The humble ‘beep’ of a scanner on a GS1 barcode is now so embedded in the social milieu that we don’t often reflect on how it came to be ubiquitous (or indeed who made it happen). The story of how 50 years ago fierce supermarket competitors got together, adopted digital tools and transformed the global economy has not often been told.
But as the barcode celebrates its birthday on Monday, its days might be numbered as it faces competition from the younger QR code, the information-filled squares used in smartphones.
Barcodes encode product information into bars and alphanumeric characters, making it much faster and easier to ring up items at a store or track inventory in a warehouse. Besides ease and speed, bar codes’ major business benefits include accuracy, inventory control and cost savings.
The trademark beep as a product is scanned is heard about six billion times per day across the world as around 70,000 items are sold each second.
It has become so integrated in the shopping experience that it is easy to forget how much the technology revolutionized retail by speeding up the checkout process and giving retailers the ability to trace products and better manage inventory.
The barcode not only identifies a product, but “gives professionals in stores access to other functionalities,” said Laurence Vallana, head of France de SES-Imagotag, a company that specializes in electronic tagging.
Barcodes were initially patented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in the United States in 1952.
But it wasn’t until nearly two decades later, in 1971, that US engineer George Laurer perfected the technology and moves toward its commercialization began.
