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I used the self-checkout lane at Wal-Mart today, as usual. The first time I tried it, over three years ago, I was surprised how much trouble I had scanning items – the checkout clerks made it look so easy. But now I scan them quickly and easily, and I was disappointed to hear an employee say that the self-checkout lanes will probably be going away due to frequent equipment problems (the woman in front of me couldn’t get the system to accept her debit card and had to insert thirty one dollar bills in the machine).

I discovered this evening (from wikipedia.org) that the UPC was first used to scan a product as part of a retail purchase thirty-four years ago today. (To mark that bit of history, that pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum sold at Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio is on exhibit at the Smithsonian.) I was twelve years old then, and often helped with the family shopping. I’m trying to remember, now, what it was like to buy groceries without UPC codes and scanners.

Some stores still affix adhesive labels with the price printed on them to products on their shelves. I guess that must be how all pricing was done in my childhood, though I really can’t remember it clearly. (I do remember the time I bought tuna flavored cat food by mistake instead of canned tuna, because the cans were the same size and I was excited to see the price lower than I expected. As our cat was fed dry cat food – and the occasional slice of raw liver – I returned the unwanted cans to the store and purchased tuna.)

I never gave bar codes much thought until I worked for Coding Products, a division of ITW, and had to write programs to print bar codes used for internal tracking and for packaging sent to customers. I learned just how many different kinds of bar codes there were – we didn’t use UPC, I think it was Code 38. I came to see those familiar black and white stripes with much more appreciation for the effort that went into making them the wonderful productivity tools that they are today.

For the 25th anniversary of the UPC’s introduction, PriceWaterhouseCoopers prepared a report showing the amazing benefits brought about by that technological innovation, as well as how much could still be done. They reported that in 1974, the average store carried 9000 SKU’s (stock-keeping units), and in 1997, that number had risen to 30,000 while allowing managers to control their inventory far better than before. I’m sure that now, more than ten years later, the numbers are even higher.

Not everyone expected the UPC to be such a success. A website detailing the history of bar codes reports that “The developers of the U.P.C. believed that there would be fewer than 10,000 companies, almost all in the US grocery industry, who would ever use the U.P.C. Today, there are over one million companies in more than 100 countries in over twenty different industry sectors enjoying the benefits of scanning.”

As the UPC required widespread use to be really cost-effective, and companies had little motivation to adopt it until it had widespread use, it is perhaps remarkable that it did get sufficient support to become successful. Not everyone liked the idea, of course. Unions opposed it because it was a labor-saving technology that would replace people with machines. Some religious groups saw it as the precursor of the Mark of the Beast. (I even found a website claiming that 666 is hidden in every barcode – because the “guard bars” at the beginning, middle, and end are visually similar to the numeral six when it appears in the right half of the code.)

I also found articles suggesting that RFID (radio frequency identification) is today’s technology equivalent of the UPC thirty years ago. It has similarly been distrusted as having too much potential to allow the government to keep tabs on people, and similarly has been increasing accepted in daily life. I wear an RFID badge at work that gets me into the building and into my work area (a restricted area that contains the corporation’s main datacenter). Faculty and staff at the schools my sons attend wear similar badges, as part of a security system much more effective than the old “Visitors must sign in at the office” signs.

Perhaps by the time my kids are the age I am now, today’s UPC codes will seem as antiquated as handwritten price tags do today. In the meantime, I hope Wal-Mart can fix their equipment rather than have to discard it. I like being my own checkout clerk.