Universal Product Code Essays - Barcodes, Universal Product Code

Universal Product Code Last year on a camping trip Lisa Warden and her daughter Jessica stopped for groceries in an extremely small town. While shopping, Jessica kept hearing an unfamiliar noise and asked what it was, but Lisa was not sure what she was talking about. Because Lisa remembers the cash register age she did not realize Jessica had never heard one actually working in a store. When they were in the check out line Jessica pointed at the old cash register and told her mom that is the noise she has been hearing. Lisa laughed and tried to explain that at one time all stores had cash registers like this one. Jessica was born in the computer age and could not comprehend the thought of cashiers and baggers doing so much work. Before bar codes, cashiers had to look at each price tag and manually key enter the dollar amount. This made the consumer have to wait in long check out lines, which did not make for a pleasant experience. Because the cashier was busy entering each item's price, he or she did not have time to bag the merchandise. The retailer had to hire another person to put the products into bags, and this increased the prices. Ed Leibowitz reported that supermarket's net margins were one percent in the more profitable times, but down six percent by 1970 (130). Their inventory control did not help their net margins because of the considerable time it took and their employee wages they paid. Consumers, retailers, and producers have benefited with the invention of the bar code by saving time and money. The bar code is a series of thirteen numbers written in a coded form of black and white lines that a scanner can read. The definition according to The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia is, The printed code used for recognition by a bar code reader (scanner). Traditional one-dimensional bar codes use the bar's width as the code, but encode just an ID or account number. Two-dimensional bar codes, such as PDF417 from Symbol Technology, are read horizontally and vertically. PDF417 holds 1,800 characters in an area the size of a postage stamp (Freedman 62). The Universal Product Code (UPC) is thirteen numbers divided into three sections: the first five digits are the manufacturer's code, the next seven digits are the product's code, and the last digit is a check digit (Hartston). The bar code currently being used is one-dimensional, but the appetite for including more and more detail in bar code messages seems to have no limit. An item's label has limited space, and because of this, stacked bar codes, better known as two-dimensional bar codes have been developed. Explained in Using Bar Code--Why it's Taking Over, A symbology called Code 49, the first stacked bar code to receive widespread interest, was introduced by Intermec Corporation in 1987. The following year Laserlight Systems, Inc. introduced Code 16K as an entry in the symbology category. Since then, several additional stacked symbologies have been introduced. The stacked symbology of Code 16K is designed to contain from 2 to 16 rows of bars. Each row has a row designator (in UPC symbology) on each end of the row, and five message characters between them in Code 128 format. This gives Code 16K a message capacity of 77 full ASCII characters, or 154 numeric characters, within a very small label (Collins 38). Two-dimensional bar codes are not yet in the mainstream of bar code technology. They do represent the direction in which the technology is headed. Railroad cars used bar codes in the 1960's to track each car to provide accounting reports for freight car rental. Bar codes were first patented in 1949, but it was retail that bar coding made its mark (Gowrie). Retail bar coding first appeared on a pack of gum at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974 (Glanz 9). "Bar code scanning is probably the single most revolutionary thing that has happened in retail sales in 50 years," says George Goldberg, founder and former publisher of SCAN, an industry newsletter (qtd. in Gowrie). Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard "Bob" Silver, mechanical engineering instructors at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Technology, overheard a supermarket executive trying to sell the Drexel dean on a research project to automate the checkout counter. The dean declined, but Woodland and Silver began pursuing the research on their own. Woodland left Drexel but could not stop thinking about the concept. He first thought of a code, and the only code he knew