Oh the humble bar code

Bar Code

An historical technology that’s still enormously useful today is the bar code.

We see them everywhere – on every product we buy from the supermarket, retail store.

They are used the world over for inventory control.  They identify the product model, the manufacturer.  They can uniquely identify millions of products, wherever in the world they are used.

Given that they use a pretty lo-fi monochrome series of vertical bars they can be printed on a huge number of materials, they are incredibly precise.  Built-in error prevention exists in the form of a check digit line that uses an algorithm to ensure the code has been scanned accurately.

Although we seldom give them much thought they are one of those base technologies that our modern world needs.  Without the ability to rapidly scan large numbers of products we couldn’t have supermarkets or retail warehouses of the convenience we expect.  Throughput of product counting, selling, warehousing would be drastically reduced. 

QR Code

Barcodes took retail sales out of the corner shop era.  They mean that shops no longer need to price each article, the price can be adjusted immediately without any re-pricing of the individual items.

The vast depots of Amazon and Walmart could never be accessed without barcodes and derivatives.  Supermarkets couldn’t draw on the in-depth sales analysis that tells them precisely who bought what and how much.

It’s a technology that will be with us for many years to come.  It’s given rise to other optical marks such as the QR codes that can hold so much more information, such as web URLs.

Humble but such a vital part of modern commerce.