You know those black and white lines on the back or side of your drink you bought at the store? Or maybe those weird lines on your pack of gum? Those lines, are called a Barcode or U.P.C code. Well, today is the 35th anniversary of the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.) Barcode and will be celebrated Wednesday by GS1 US, the developer and administrator of the U.P.C. for more than 200,000 businesses in the United States.
The organization will mark the event with a giant U.P.C.-adorned birthday cake for more than 800 attendees at its annual U Connect Conference in Orlando Florida.
The barcode, one of the world`s best-known symbols, the U.P.C. 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.
This barcode or U.P.C, is then able to be read by a barcode scanner, or a machine that is able to decipher the white and black lines into a product name and price.
Originally developed to help supermarkets speed up the checkout process, the first live use of a U.P.C. 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 alike, with estimated annual cost savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone, according to one study.
Replacing individual price-labeling with the U.P.C. 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 U.P.C. was quickly adopted by other industries, which sought to capture the benefits it had delivered to the grocery industry. Today U.P.C.s 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.
Integral to the U.P.C.`s success are its flexibility – usable on myriad surfaces – and the foresight of the people who decided to design it with the capacity to
identify millions of unique items. Although the range of its use today was not envisioned in 1974, when supermarkets carried a fraction of the inventory they carry today, the U.P.C. nevertheless accommodates the creation each year of tens of thousands of new products.
The U.P.C. is equally important to small entrepreneurs, who sell their products through large retailers, which require the barcode for both sales and recall
purposes. GS1 US helps several thousand such businesses create their U.P.C.`s annually.
Contrary to one popular myth, the U.P.C. does not contain a product`s country of origin. But the U.P.C. is one manifestation of the Global Trade Item Number, a foundational aspect of the GS1 System that enables consistent, standard identification of products and other items in the supply chain globally.
“The U.P.C. really is fundamental to commerce,” said 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.”
