The Barcode’s retail history began in 1952 when the first patent for a barcode type product was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver.
But it was an invention ahead of its time and it took another 22 years for the first product with a barcode to be sold in a shop.
Silver and Woodland were graduate students at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. A local food chain asked the Institute if it could research a method of automatically reading product information during checkout. Woodland’s first design used patterns of ink that glowed under ultraviolet light, but the ink was unstable and expensive. Undefeated, Woodland quit his teaching job at Drexel, took some stock market earnings and moved to Florida to work on the problem.
Trial and error resulted in the development of a ‘straight line pattern’. It had four white lines on a dark background. The information was coded by the presence or absence of one or more of the lines. Eureka!
Neither Woodland nor Silver made much money from their invention and they sold the patent to RCA (The Radio Corporation of America) for a relatively small sum of money. The RCA code had problems and it was left to Logicon, Inc, to work with The National Association of Food Chains, to develop an industry-wide barcode system. By 1970, an industry standard had developed – the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code or UGPIC.
The first product to have a barcode was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum. On June 26, 1974 at 8.01 am, Sharon Buchana, a checker at Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned the 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It cost 67 cents. It was the first item lifted out of the shopping cart by a shopper, Clyde Dawson. Today, that pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
Contribution to Retail History
The barcode was one of the most important inventions that revolutionized the retail industry. It completely automated the speed and accuracy of the checkout process. The barcode also transformed the entire supply chain and distribution process and provided extensive market data and consumer research. Retailers and manufacturers could readily determine what products were selling, check inventory levels and monitor distribution.