Price Check

Marc: Somewhere in the late 2000s-ish. I don't know. Eight, nine, ten. Somewhere in there. I don't know. I was working at a company called Semtech. That's not to be confused with the explosives, Semtechs.

Renee: Bummer. I know.

Marc: Besides some of the security products we made for Verifone, we also built handheld payment terminals and ruggedized handheld devices. And they're so fun. They drop them. They have the drop thing and they drop them and they bounce and stuff. It's fun. And we put some cool components into them. One of these was the imager, which is a camera-based barcode reader. And we used it because an imager is faster than a scanner, a laser scanner. And I think there were two makers of this at the time for imagers. We'll talk about imagers in a few minutes, but I think there were two different makers. We integrated a lot of scanning and imaging hardware into those devices. And then Verifone, one of the big payment terminal makers, bought us. And they bought us for a bunch of the security stuff we were working on, but they also picked up this little kind of custom unit shop, which was cool. I remember we made a bunch of these things for Motorola and we would go around the office and zap everybody with them. They'd go, choo-choo-choo. I don't know. It was really cool. Very nerdy, I suppose.

Renee: It's the right podcast for you. So I remember shopping before scanners and I remember that... I remember watching the women who would work at the checkout, right? And they would do the 10 key so fast. Like, they're not scanning a barcode. They're looking at a price on the top of the can, right? Yeah. And they're doing this over and over and over. And they're hitting 179, 179, 179, 236, 179, 18, 236. Like, it's crazy, right? And they're whipping it as fast as they can. I actually think they were faster at 10 key than they are at boop, because they don't have to look for the boop, right? They were just faster at it. It was unbelievable. When you think about what the world was like before then, it was that and everything that went on sale, where pricing changed. It came to you from corporate in a big list. It would tell you a description of what it is. It's Del Monte, eight ounce can of. Pineapple. You'd be like, got it. Pineapple. Eight ounces is it. It's on sale. cents off. Like literally that was it, right? And anyone who was working at the checkout had to know everything that was on sale, right? Because it may or may not have changed the actual... It might have just been 50% off because it was sitting here, but the pricing is still... Like that stuff wasn't in the register. It was in someone's brain, right? Like I still... If you want to know why they were unionized, that's it right there. That was not an easy job. It was not an easy job. You stood on your feet a lot and you had to remember a lot of crap and you had a 10 kilo crazy. What a crazy job. Job being a checkout person used to be. Like, it's so simple now that we can do it without any help. Like, that's the epitome of simple. Like, anything that could do it without any help, right? But yeah, but back in the day, like, yeah, I'll say, like, that was amazing. It should have been an Olympic event. And I'm sad for everybody who missed out on that. I'm sad for all of you.

Marc: The little, like, you know, they were so fast at the numbers and stuff. And then you think about self-checkout today you pick up the thing and you're like moving it around yeah like i don't know straightening

Renee: It out because it might be crinkles and that's why the barcode isn't getting red.

Marc: Yeah the whole thing yeah yeah all right so so obviously we're going to talk about barcodes and uh the barcode uh started it's like it's a it's like a piece of printed thing right but there's a lot of tech it's on everything it's on everything on everything everything yeah all right So the barcode started as an idea. Two grad students, of course, there's two grad students, right?

Renee: Of course it was, yeah.

Marc: Had this idea.

Renee: Do we know what school they were at? Because I just assume it was Carnegie Mellon, no? No, no, it wasn't.

Marc: It wasn't. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. All right, all right. They had the idea in 1948, and it took 26 years to get into a shop. That's crazy, 1948 to 26 years later.

Renee: That's crazy.

Marc: And according to GS1, the nonprofit that hands out barcode numbers, it now gets scanned more than 10 billion times a day that's crazy that's crazy times today so welcome to another episode of the nostalgic nerves podcast where we talk about technology past present and future tonight it's the barcode i'm on the milk in the morning bread i'm on the

Renee: Before we go back, what's actually in one? When I look at a barcode, it's stripes and some numbers underneath. Like, what is it?

Marc: The one on the can of soup or pineapple that you just, you know, in the U.S. is called a UPC, Universal Product Code. It's 12 digits, and the stripes are the same 12 digits written a second time for a machine. The code is divided into 95 very narrow columns, which the industry calls modules. Each digit takes up seven modules, split into two dark bars and two light spaces, and the combination of widths is the digit. At each end, and again in the middle, there's a guard pattern. It's like a few thin bars that tell the scanner where the code starts, where it starts, and somewhere where the middle is. The last of the 12 digits is a check digit worked out by a sum from the other 11. So you add up the 11 and it has to make a certain number. So if the scanner misreads a digit, the sum won't come out right and the reader or the till rejects the read instead of charging you for the wrong item. So it's a, you know, it's a quality measure. To read it, the scanner shines light across the code and measures what bounces back. Dark bars absorb the light so that light doesn't bounce back. Then the light spaces reflect it. And the timing of dark and light gives you the widths.

Renee: So did they steal this from Hollywood or did Hollywood steal it from them? I'm just wondering.

Marc: I know we're talking about like the optical sound, right?

Renee: Yes. And it's reading barcodes like shades of gray to make sound. Yeah.

Marc: I mean, this. Yeah. You know what? When I was researching it, I didn't find any connection there. But the optical sound.

Renee: I just think it's interesting.

Marc: Yeah, it is interesting. Optical sound was way before that.

Renee: Way before that, right? So, yeah. And to think that they probably could have done the same thing. Yeah, no kidding. Right in the 40s, right? And it still didn't take off for another 21 years or something, right? Yeah. Like they had the technology. They had it for a long time to sort this out.

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: So the numbers printed underneath are for when the machine can't read it. But those numbers are tiny sometimes. And I'm getting old. They're tiny sometimes. You have a little tiny.

Marc: They're so small. Yeah, so a cache in a can type.

Renee: Yeah, like I'm not meant to read those, right? Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, a cashier can type them in by hand if they have to, right? For a long time in some shops, typing it by hand was the system. So we'll get to that, though. I know. Crazy. So, all right. The idea for Barcode starts in Philadelphia in 1948 at what was then Drexel Institute of Technology and Engineering School. A graduate student there named Bernard Silver overhears a supermarket executive asking one of the deans whether the school could build something to capture product information automatically at the checkout. And the dean turns him down. Whatever. The lack of vision. Yeah. What's the dean's name in The Simpsons at the school? I can't remember. When Homer goes back to school. Yeah. Oh, oh. What's his name? Dean, Dean something.

Renee: Go ahead, I'm going to look it up.

Marc: Oh, yeah. All right. So anyways, Silver tells his friend and fellow Drexel graduate, Norman Joseph Woodland, and Woodland can't let it go. He's got this idea and he just kind of fixates on it for quite some time.

Renee: By Woodland's own account, told many years later, he was in Miami Beach in January 1949, sitting on the sand and thinking about, you know, Morse code.

Marc: As you do.

Renee: As one does when vacationing in Miami. The system of dots and dashes used on the telegraph, right? That's Morse code. He pushed his fingers into the sand and pulled them towards him. And the dots and the dashes stretched out into thin and thick lines. Woodland said to himself that sounded like a fairy tale, and there's just no one else to confirm it. But that's his own memory about how it happened. He was just sitting there going dot, dash, dot, dot, dash, and thought thin, fat, thin, thin, fat. That could tell you a story, right? That's crazy. That's crazy.

Marc: Morse code already carries information in short and long signals. So turning a short and a long into a thin bar and a thick bar is a small step. What he and Silver added was the bullseye. They bent the lines around into rings because a set of concentric circles looks the same from any direction. So the person at the till wouldn't have to line the product up with the reader. Very clever, huh?

Renee: Oh, that's good.

Marc: Yeah, very clever. They filed a patent on the 20th of October, 1949, called Classifying Apparatus and Method. And it was granted on, I know it's very generic there, guys.

Renee: We got to get back to naming stuff like that. Yeah. Fantastically boring.

Marc: And it was granted on the 7th of October, 1952. Look, the patent office was slow even then. The drawings in it show both versions, the straight lines and the rings, but neither of them got rich from it, though.

Renee: They sold the patent to Philco, the radio and television maker, for $15,000, and according to the New York Times, that was all either of them ever made from it. Philco later sold it to RCA. The patent expired in 1969, and at that point, nobody had used it to sell a single product in a shop. Woodland goes on to work for IBM in 1951. Silver dies in 1963 at 38, 11 years before a barcode was ever scanned at checkout. And the first people to use a barcode for real were the railways. American railroads had more than a million freight cars moving around the country and needed to know where each one was. GTE Sylvania, the electronics company, built a system called CarTrack. Car with a K. CarTrack. Like crab with a K, only it's a car. Which put a label of colored stripes, red, blue, white, and black on the side of every car and a scanner beside the track, read it as the train went past. It was first tested in 1961 on the Boston and Maine Railroad, and in 1967, the Association of American Railroads, the industry body, made it compulsory on every single car.

Marc: I love this part. This is funny. In practice, it didn't hold up, though. By 1975, about 90% of cars had the labels. So good, yay, you know, standards, and there you go. But only about 80% of them were being read correctly. Freight cars. Yeah, I mean, this makes sense, right? Freight cars are filthy. The labels got covered in grime and knocked about, and nobody enforced keeping them clean. So here's the standard. You got to put it on everything. but the standard doesn't say anything about keeping it clean. In late 1977, the railroads voted by about 5 to 1 to drop the requirement after the industry had spent roughly $150 million on it.

Renee: Okay, you know what? And it's more accurate than AI. So I don't know. Maybe they were on to something. They just kept it clean. So it's the supermarkets that eventually make it work. RCA, the electronics giant, ran the first proper checkout trial with a bullseye code at Kroger. Kroger, which if you live in California, it's Ralph's, the big supermarket chain based in Cincinnati. The first scanning check stands went into the Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati on the 3rd of July in 1972. That's ballsy, 3rd of July, like it's right before the holiday and you're going.

Marc: To switch this thing over.

Renee: That's really ballsy.

Marc: I can't buy my hot dogs. Why can't I? Yeah.

Renee: Next thing you know, you're typing that all. Anyway, the 3rd of July, 1972, and the trial ran for about 18 months.

Marc: Yeah. Is Ralph's Kroger?

Renee: Is that what it is in California? Yeah, yeah. And then on the East Coast, it was all Kroger. On the West Coast, it was all Ralph's.

Marc: But it was King Soopers in the middle.

Renee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the middle, it was completely something else. Yeah, yeah. They're huge.

Marc: Okay, so it runs straight into a printing problem, of all things. On a printing press, the paper moves in one direction, and the ink smears a little in the direction it's moving. On a set of rings, a smear in one direction distorts two sides of every circle, and the scanner can't read them. On straight bars, if the smear runs along the length of the bars, the bars just come out a little taller, and the code reads fine. Woodland and Silver had picked the rings so a code could be read from any angle, and in practice, they could be printed reliably at the speed of packaging press runs. Because, you know, with like a box of cereal, those boxes, they're, you know, it's a multicolor press, you know, the whole thing. And they're sliding through the system. They go fast. So, yeah.

Renee: So by then the grocery industry had worked out that it needed one standard. You know, everybody comes to the realization eventually that standards just make everything easier. If every manufacturer printed its own kind of code, no shop could buy a single scanner that read all of them. In 1970, the big grocers and food manufacturers set up the Ad Hoc Committee on Uniform Grocery Product Code. You know, they didn't get any better at naming things 10 years later.

Marc: Right?

Renee: Working with the consultants at McKinsey. Oh, dear Lord. And they invented companies to submit a design. Seven companies did.

Marc: IBM's came from an engineer there called George Lauer, and it was a rectangle. A straight code of bars and spaces with those guard patterns at the ends and in the middle. Woodland, you know, one of our first friends there, was working at IBM by then, too. But the UPC is glorious design. On the 30th of March 1973, at a meeting in a New York hotel, the committee picked that one. After having it checked at MIT, the rectangle had exactly the advantage the Kroger trial had exposed because you could print it on a fast press, on a cardboard box or a plastic wrapper, and a smear along the bars wouldn't ruin it.

Renee: And then someone had to go first. The worst, like, you're like, anytime you talk to a vendor and they have something new, the first thing you say is, who's done this already? And if they say no, you're like, I'm not going first. Like, that's the first thing you say, right?

Marc: And grocery, man.

Renee: Right. You can't get that wrong. People are crazy about groceries. So anyway, Marsh Supermarket, a regional chain in Ohio and Indiana, volunteered its store in Troy, Ohio. At about one minute past eight in the morning on the 26th of June, 1974, a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum went across the scanner and rang up at 67 cents. The person buying it was Marsh's own head of research and development. And he picked the gum on purpose to show that a barcode could be printed on something that small and still be red.

Marc: Yeah, that's pretty smart. The scanner used a helium neon laser. That's the red laser you've seen in like school physics labs and stuff, shining up through a window in the counter and it was wired to an NCR cash register. The NCR National Cash Register being the company that had been making cash registers since the 1880s.

Renee: There's a claim you'll see all over the place that the actual pack of gum is in the Smithsonian. The museum says it isn't, So if you see an old pack of juicy fruit, you may as well eat it because it's not supposed to be there. The pack stayed with the marsh manager who bought it. I'm assuming he chewed it. Otherwise, it would be really stale by now. So the Smithsonian put a replica on display and Smithsonian Magazine printed a correction in 2017. And after all of that, the shops weren't interested. In March 1976, Business Week, the business magazine, ran a story headlined, The Supermarket Scanner That Failed. And by the end of the 70s, only about 1% of American grocery stores actually had scanners.

Marc: It's nuts. Like, it's ubiquitous now.

Renee: I wish. I wish. That's how AI was going right now. Just, I'm like, go ahead. I just got it.

Marc: We should talk about, we should do an update, another update episode on Tamagotchi because that stupid Muse thing. Right? The Facebook Muse thing.

Renee: Everybody's like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe how things are – like, what is happening? We're all getting crazy, like, mind games that this thing is – I'm like, dude, we have been conditioned to talk to machines since 1990. Like, why is any of this a surprise? I don't understand.

Marc: Okay, go ahead. Okay, another episode, another episode.

Renee: Seriously, because I just want to scream about that, too.

Marc: All right, so grocery stores, right? It was a chicken and egg problem. So a shop wouldn't pay for scanners, and that stuff is expensive, by the way. Those checkout tills, a fully tricked one, tricked out, it's a lot. It's thousands. A shop wouldn't pay for scanners until most of what it sold had a code on it. Yeah, and the manufacturers didn't want to pay to redesign their packaging until enough shops could read it. It took the mass merchandisers, Kmart was the first, taking it up across everything they sold to tip it over. And by 1989, more than half of American grocery sales were going through a scanner. That's still, you know, 10 years, you know, 10, 12 years. It's crazy. Yeah. Some big retailers.

Renee: Movie theaters cut over to digital faster. I know. Movie theaters who made almost no money. I mean, think about it. They only make money on popcorn and Coke. Like, there's not a lot of money to be made there. But they've figured it out. Go ahead.

Marc: Yeah. Some big retailers held out a long time. I was telling you this before. I remember Price Club, which is the warehouse store that merged with Costco in 1993. They're running two people at every till. One would read that I think it's like a six or seven digit number item number off of each product out loud. And the other would type it into the 10 keypad and repeat it back. It's like so fast.

Renee: That was quality control, though. We used to do that with stock trades, too. Like, one of you typed it in, a whole stack of stock trades, because somebody would call them in on the phone, and you would type them all in and then hand that stack over, and somebody else would pick up that batch and retype them in. And if we didn't agree on a number, we sat down and looked at it together and said, that's a seven, that's a one. It's a seven, it's a one. Why does it have that thing through it? Oh, it's a seven. Like, that's what we would do, right, in order to make sure that your trade went in before the days of automated training, right? So like i so here i would say that do i remember shops doing it by hand yes and i don't think the lines were any worse than they are at costco today to be honest with you like i don't think they're any worse so, i don't know if it took longer or not but yeah i do remember that but then we did everything by hand sam and i were watching what the hell were we watching the other night we were watching airplane we're watching the movie airplane and somebody pays for something with a credit card and they pull out the credit card thing oh yeah and the carbon and they start And we're laughing so hard when I was crying. We're like, oh, my God, I remember that. And I said, I turned to Sam and I said, then you got the book out. You got the book out. It was a book MasterCard and Visa sent out. And you would look to see if you found that credit card number in the book. And if you did, you called an 800 number. And they would say, that's stolen. Keep it and called the cops. Like, what? Like, you don't pay me enough for this. I'm like, no. You know, but yeah, that's what we used to do. We used to look it up in the book. And so if it wasn't in the book because the book that month didn't publish yet, You might be able to use that carb for a whole 30 days and no one would know the difference. It was crazy. It was crazy. So do I remember shops doing it by hand? Yes. But again, I don't think it's any worse, to be honest with you. I sit, I spend a lot of time sitting in lines where people are scanning all kinds of crap and I'm tapping to pay and somehow it's taken longer than it ever took ever. Okay, go ahead.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: I think it's why today when I go to Target, I order it online and I pick it up and just like have them deliver it to the car. Because every time I go into Target, there are more people.

Marc: You're still shopping at Target. Well, I thought the boycott was on.

Renee: You know, dude, it's been like five years. Like at some point, the boycott's got to mean nothing, you know. But anyway, like I don't go in because everybody who works there who should be checking people out are doing shopping for people who shop online. So I just figured, screw it, I'll get in the shop online line instead of sitting in this one, right? And so they'll just bring it out. And I don't know what the SLA is on the checkout line. Like, it must be 30 minutes because that's about how long I wait. But for the car, like, yeah, we have to have it due in three minutes. I mean, three minutes. That's crazy. Three minutes. Like, it is all out of whack, right? So, yeah, I don't think it's any quicker, but, you know, it's probably more accurate.

Marc: When I worked at Verifone, I guess at Chase as well. But, I mean, we spent, gosh, I literally was working with every single top retailer in the U.S., every grocery store, you know, every department store, everybody that had multi-lane environments. And, you know, you could tell. You could tell who was concerned about, you know, throughput at the lane, you know, what the cost was, you know, per, you know, per lane and that sort of thing. And those scanning systems and stuff, it was a huge, for them, you know, that was, it was a huge money saver, even though those things were expensive because they could, you know, get more people through so you didn't have to have as wide, you know, as wide of a network. Of people. Do you remember, what was that place, Fry's Electronics? Do you remember that?

Renee: I do remember Fry's. Okay.

Marc: The thing that Fry's was, like, famous for was having, like, a thousand checkout lines. You know, so it was like you never had to wait.

Renee: They did, though. You never waited for anything. Yeah, that's true.

Marc: Yeah, that's crazy. Anyways, yeah. All right.

Renee: So if I think about Europe went its own way first, though, the European Article Numbering Association was set up in Brussels in 1977 using a 13-digit code. Built to be compatible with the American one. The first barcode scanned in Britain was a packet of Melrose tea bags, of course it was, at Key Market Supermarket in Spaulding in Lincolnshire on the 2nd of October in 1979. The American and European bodies eventually came together, and since 2005, they've been one organization, GS1, which is who issues barcode numbers to companies today. So it's kind of like a class AIP, right? Like you better call someone so they give you the right one so that you don't overlap with anyone else. It actually is a lot to keep track of. You can't have two barcodes that are the same.

Marc: Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't have two things that are the same. All right.

Renee: All right. For shoppers, the barcode came with the catch. Once the price lives in the store's computer... What? And the scanner looks it up. The shop doesn't need a sticker on every item. That was a large part of the savings for the grocers, because somebody was being paid to walk the aisles with a price gun stamping every single can. For shoppers, it meant you couldn't see what you were paying for for something until you got to the till.

Marc: Okay so like so we went to we went to the states okay before i like a little tangent here we we went to the states this summer for a wedding and there was a grocery store in town in eureka springs and you know they had scanners and stuff but they also had stickers on stuff you know and so

Renee: See you should be suspect of that it's probably been there since.

Marc: 86 And there was, you know, there's somebody with the sticker gun, you know, and like a stick, stick. It's just, I don't know, it's kind of crazy.

Renee: God bless them. Mom and pop stores, right? Yeah, yeah. God bless them.

Marc: All right. So who pushed back on the stickers and the pricing?

Renee: Well, the Consumer Federation of America, the National Consumer Lobbying Group, led the campaign and gave evidence at a Senate symposium on it in December 1974. That same year, protesters briefly held up the opening of a giant supermarket in Tyson's Corners, Virginia. The industry answer was to hand out grease pencils so shoppers could write the prices on their shopping themselves. Oh my God, here's a grease pencil. Just keep track.

Marc: Oh my gosh, that's nuts. So... Do any of the states step in?

Renee: You know, some did. Michigan passed an item pricing law in 1976 requiring a price on individual products, and California had one for a while. Of course. There was never a federal law, so it ended up being decided state by state because, damn it, states' rights. And in most places, the sticker went. The other pushback was religious. In the early 80s, an evangelical writer called Mary Stuart Ralph published a pair of books about the end of the world. And in them, she argued that the barcode was the mark of the beast from the book of Revelation and the number 666 that everybody would have to carry in order to buy or sell. The claim that every barcode had three hidden sixes in it. Like, this is some... Okay, okay, okay, okay. Clearly, she was mentally ill. Like, she's the kind of person, if it weren't for a barcode, she would think that every other word in a news article is speaking to her. Like, that's the kind of mental illness this is. But to have written two books about it, and people do have taken you seriously. About it to the point where people are thinking there are three sixes in every barcode is kind of crazy. That's kind of crazy.

Marc: It's a little crazy, but, okay, but. All right, the recent people thought— Wait,

Renee: You're going to defend that it's the mark of the beast?

Marc: No, no, not at all. Not at all. But there is something interesting here. So the reason that people thought that it was the sixes was the guard patterns. Do you remember the little things we talked about? Yeah, the thin bars at each end and in the middle happen to look very like the bar patterns for the digit six. They're markers, though. They're a different width from any digit. And they don't encode a number at all. Their job is to tell the scanner where the code starts, where it stops, and where it splits in two. George Lauer's own answer was that they do resemble the code for a six, though. But it's just a coincidence.

Renee: You know what? You know what? Like, Sarah, like, why don't you just throw fuel in that fire? Like, yeah, that is a six, but I didn't mean it like that. Like, you're just asking for this to just go, oh, my God. Okay. So, I don't remember that. The only reason I know who this woman is, this is so crazy. This is so stupid. You know Slumdog Millionaire? Yeah. Like, he thinks back to, like, oh, I saw this and then I saw that and I put those two things together. And that's how I came up with this answer. Like, okay, this is one of those things for me, right? So, I don't know anything about this chick. I don't know anything about the barcode thing. All I know is I'm watching Ghost Adventures and one of these guys, I'm not kidding you, they're in the home that was owned by Mary Stewart Ralph. Right because she was into no way yes yes yes she's into all kinds of different like um like occult stuff she was into all of that like this, this wasn't her only thing she was into all that crap and so they go to her house and they're in because it's they say it's haunted and this guy has a barcode on his wrist oh no and it's got scratches all over it like something scratched him and they scratched his barcode and they're like it's her it's her she hates barcodes like Like, that's the only reason I know any of this is because I watch stupid ghost hunting crap.

Marc: Oh, my gosh. I thought you would go into, like, the grocery store, like, the Weekly World News or something like that.

Renee: No, it was Ghost Adventures. That's way better. It was probably last year. That's way better.

Marc: Oh, my gosh.

Renee: Yeah, he had a barcode on his wrist. And it was something scratched him. And he ended up with a scratch through the barcode. You're like, it's Mary. It's Mary.

Marc: I couldn't have planned that any better. oh my gosh All right. So the first checkout scanners used helium neon lasers mounted under the counter. And those are the red ones, remember? The beam bounced off spinning mirrors to draw a pattern of crossing lines up through the glass. Do you remember the cross? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Renee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would look like it was blinking.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the code only had to pass through one of those lines to be read. So the laser pops up and it kind of shoots it in all different directions. In November of 1980, IBM announced a holographic checkout scanner, the 3687, because of course it had to be a number. Right.

Renee: Wait, is this like the Cuba scan? Is this what this is?

Marc: No, it's not like the Cuba scan, but yeah, which used a spinning disk of holograms in place of the mirrors to throw the beam out at more angles so the checker didn't have to be so careful about how things went across. So that's why they could go so fast. It goes beep, beep, beep.

Renee: Gotcha. But it's all still bolted to a counter. Like, it's all still bolted onto a counter.

Marc: Right? Yeah, yeah. Well, and they're big, right? Yeah. Oh, and remember the ones that were, like, integrated with the weighing? You know, you could drop your— Oh,

Renee: Yeah, you could put the weight up there, punch it in a number. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marc: Yeah, so it was all on the counter until Symbol Technologies, a Long Island company founded in 1973, brought out a handheld laser scanner in 1982. The LS for laser scanner. 7,000.

Renee: Dude, wait, we had laser scanners at the warehouse when we worked at dot com. So we messed with barcodes for sure.

Marc: Once the scanner was a gun, you could carry it around. You remember Dana had like a holster for hers?

Renee: Yep, she did.

Marc: The barcode could go anywhere. A person could walk with it. The warehouse, the stockroom, the back of the delivery van.

Renee: So when does the imager come in?

Marc: Yeah, a laser scanner reads one line at a time. So it sort of sweeps across the beam, you know, across the bars and measures reflections. That's how you see, you know, a checker tilting a box back and forth sometimes trying to get the line across the code. But an imager is a camera um it uses the same family of sensor chips it's in a phone camera a ccd first and then what's called cmos but not like cmos like we think of cmos um to take a picture of the whole code all at once and then software finds the code in the picture and decodes it from the two two thousands onwards imagers took over and there's three reasons before i get to that but that's the that's like that was the what we had at the um at the dot-com we were we had we had early imaging imager guns because they remember they would go and you could see it it would just sort of like take a picture almost instead of the the the like the laser buzzing back and forth it would you know it like all at once it would like flash that's yeah that was an imager So the three reasons. Number one, they read the code at any angle in a single frame, so they could be all like weird angles and stuff, which makes them faster. Two, they could read codes that are damaged or badly printed, That's helpful. And then last, they can Read the code off the phone screen, which a laser scanner kind of can't do, but some of them are okay at doing it because laser depends on the light bouncing off, and a phone screen is kind of giving off its own light. But, yeah.

Renee: And the imager is what makes two-dimensional codes possible. So what's the difference there?

Marc: Yeah, so the barcodes, you know, it's one thing all the way across. An ordinary barcode only stores that information in one direction. You can make it as tall as you want, and it still holds the same 12 digits. A two-dimensional code stores information across and down as a grid of little squares, so it holds far more in the same space. A lot of people carry a couple of them without even noticing. PDF 417, which was invented at Symbol in 1991, is the dense striped rectangle in the back of the U.S. or Canadian driving license. And when a bar scans your license, it reads your name, date of birth, address, all that whole thing. The data matrix is the tiny square grid printed on medicine packs and etched into engine parts. Look how they got things like that.

Renee: And the best-known two-dimensional code of all, right, came out of the car industry.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. Denso is one of Toyota's biggest parts suppliers. And in the early 90s, its factories were scanning several barcodes on each box of parts because one barcode couldn't hold enough information. Do you imagine that? Like, here's a part. No. And so you scan one. And then to get to, like, the rest of the information, you scan another one and then another one. And then you have a computer system that like does a three-way join or something like that.

Renee: Oh, for Pete's sake.

Marc: Yeah, that would be lame. I could see that Toyota would flip out. So anyways, an engineer at Denso, Masahiro Hara, started work on a better code in 1992 with a colleague. And Denso released it in 1994. QR stands for quick response. The three big squares in the corners are there so the scanner can find the code fast. And work out which way is up. Hara's team surveyed printed material, flyers, magazines, cardboard boxes to find a pattern of light and dark that almost never turns up by accident.

Renee: Yeah, I know.

Marc: Only in Japan, right? And that's the ratio inside of those squares. The code also carries built-in error correction. So at its highest setting, it can still be read with about 30% of it damaged or covered up, Which is why you see QR codes with a company logo stuck in the middle It's like our stickers

Renee: Oh right, our stickers, By the way, we do have a merch shop. Go check it out. And Denso gave it away. It kept the patent, but said it would not enforce it. So anyone could use the QR code without paying for it. It spread in Japan first from 2002 when mobile phones started shipping with QR readers built in. But the place it took over completely was China. Alipay, the payment app from Alibaba Group, started taking payments by QR code in 2011, and WeChat Pay built into Tencent's WeChat messaging app followed in 2013. A shopkeeper could print a code, stick it on the counter, and take payment without buying a card terminal. In March of 2014, China's central bank suspended QR code payments over security worries, and formal rules didn't come around until 2018. India built its own version. UPI, the government-backed instant payment network, launched in 2016, and now it handles billions of payments a month, a lot of them by scanning a QR code at a market stall.

Marc: And in most of the West, it took the phone makers to get people to use it. Apple built QR reading into the iPhone's camera with iOS 11 in 2017. It's quite late. Yeah. So you didn't need a separate app. I remember downloading QR apps and stuff like that.

Renee: And it needed your entire phone stuff, your location information, and your contacts.

Marc: Yeah. Not a privacy issuer at all. Yeah. So then COVID comes around. By 2021, about half of U.S. restaurants were using QR code menus. I hate QR code menus. Let me tell you.

Renee: I do, too. Don't even get me started. Do not get me started on I can't bother to have a menu.

Marc: Yeah. Like, what's up with that?

Renee: I can't.

Marc: Yeah. But the NRA, this is the other NRA, the National Restaurant Association says, yeah, the half were using it. Yeah, that's the industry trade group there.

Renee: So criminals use QR codes, too, because, you know, this is why we can't have nice things. A QR code is a link you can't read with your own eyes before you follow it. So criminals use them to send people to fake websites. The security industry calls it quishing, short for QR phishing. Sometimes it's called code jacking, as in hijacking. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has put out warnings about it. In July 2025, the FBI warned people about parcels turning up that they hadn't ordered with a QR code inside. Okay, if I got a package that had nothing but a QR code inside, I wouldn't scan it. I'm just saying, I wouldn't scan it. Just like when I get, if I order anything from China, here's how crazy this is. Occasionally, you'll get a package of seeds. Just seeds. They don't tell you what they are.

Marc: Yeah. They're just seeds.

Renee: And you definitely don't plant them because who the hell knows what they could be an invasive species that takes over who the hell knows what. And we never grow, I don't know, bees again. I don't know. But you don't plant them. They came from who knows what this is. Right. I can't imagine that they're doing that with QR code. So that's crazy.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah, but the two things that I, like, if you combine the QR code with the URL shorteners, that's like the one-two punch of, you know, I can't read it and I hate that.

Renee: Like, yeah.

Marc: It's just, yeah, don't scan, like, strange codes.

Renee: Don't do it. Yeah, right? Yeah.

Marc: I love the guys, like, at DEF CON and stuff. Like, if you see a code at DEF CON, you know, the hacking convention in Vegas, like, no, don't. No, don't scan it.

Renee: Don't.

Marc: No. And then guys will have, they'll, they have, they carry printers and stuff around, and they'll code jack. They'll change the code just enough to make it look like it's legit, but it's not legit. It's crazy. And then you'll get redirected to some bogus site or something. Yeah. Anyways.

Renee: All right. I wouldn't use Wi-Fi there either. I wouldn't do anything. If I was in a hacker conference, I wouldn't even take my phone. I wouldn't take a laptop. I wouldn't take any of that crap.

Marc: No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about where we're going. A lot of barcode reading now is done by robots. Amazon bought a company called Kiva Systems in 2022. Kiva made small, low robots that drive underneath a shelving rack. They lift it up and carry the whole rack across a warehouse to a person standing at a picking station. The robots find their way using a grid of 2D codes stuck to the warehouse floor about a meter apart, read by a camera on the underside of each robot. In July 2025, Amazon said it had deployed its millionth robot, counting all different types of robots.

Renee: And there's drones doing it as well. I've seen people use QR code mats on lawns for drone delivery. Could you imagine? Could you imagine? Like just being like. Like, I don't know, on the battlefield and just be like, get that QR code as close to that tank as you can. We got a drone coming in. Just get that thing as close as you can. Like, that's crazy to me, but OK.

Marc: Companies like Gather AI and Verity sell drones that fly the aisles of big logistics warehouses. Yeah. Reading the labels on pallets stacked on high racking, which otherwise, you know, like if they didn't have these drones, it would mean that someone was going up on a lift.

Renee: Okay.

Marc: I know.

Renee: Okay.

Marc: That's pretty nerdy. Like, maybe just print the codes bigger, you know?

Renee: Eh, okay.

Marc: Okay, so Geodisc, the French logistics company, says it halved the time it spends counting stock with those drones. It's crazy. In supermarkets, a robot from a company called Simbi named Tally rolls up and down the aisles, checking for empty shelves and wrong price labels. And it's in about a thousand stores. It doesn't always stick, though. Walmart ended a contract with another shelf-scanning robot maker, like Simbi Bossa Nova in 2020, when those robots were in about 500 stores because Walmart decided the staff were already walking the aisles to pick online orders and they could do the same job.

Renee: Amen. And, like, Starbucks tried this. They tried this with an AI company and, it was supposed to use LiDAR to check to see what was on the shelves and the stock and then to order stuff when it was down. And they found out that it was ordering all kinds of crazy crap and they didn't need any of it. And then they were like, OK, we can't do this. We have too much crap and we don't need any of it. And so, yeah, it turned out to be this whole big thing. So we couldn't do it with like QR and scanning. So we tried to solve that with AI and it was just worse. So there you go.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Sometimes people just need to do this work. The other change is in what the label carries. GS1 has set a target. It calls Sunrise 2027. Like, we're going to be here for this. For every checkout to be able to read 2D codes by the end of next year. It's an industry goal, not a law. And the ordinary barcode isn't being banned. But a 2D code at the till can carry, the batch number, the use by date, as well as what the product is. Woolworths in Australia. Wait a minute, Australia, you still have Woolworths. Shut up.

Marc: That's big in Australia.

Renee: Oh, my God. Yeah. I haven't seen one of those since I was eight. Like, that's when it closed here. Woolworths in Australia scans more than 5 million 2D codes a week across more than 1,000 stores. And it said it's cut food waste by up to 40% on those lines because the till knows when something's about to go out of date and it can mark it down automatically. In Britain, Tesco moved its whole Tesco brand range over to 2D codes this April, starting with sausages. And the code is turning into a legal requirement. From the 18th of February, 2027, every electric car battery, e-bike battery, and large institutional batteries sold in the European Union has to carry a QR code linking to its own record, what the EU calls a battery passport. That record covers what the battery is made of, its carbon footprint, how much recycled material is in it, and how to dispose of it. Clothing and furniture are due to follow over the next few years. Medicine got there first. Every prescription pack in the EU carries a 2D code from 2019. And in the U.S. since 2023, checked at the pharmacy to catch counterfeit drugs. And I'm just going to say the bottom of my Yeti has one, too.

Marc: The bottom of your Yeti has one?

Renee: There you go. Everybody uses them.

Marc: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of data you can squish in there. Yeah. And once the till knows the use-by date and the price on the shelf is a small screen, the price can change during the day. Oh, yawning. Walmart is putting electronic shelf labels into all of its roughly 4,600 U.S. Stores by the end of this year.

Renee: Walmart says it won't use them for surge pricing. they said that they said i don't know dude go go look on youtube people are mad that like they go in and you know they go in like earlier in the day and something like i don't know snapple tea is like 11 for 16 bottles and then they'll go back later in the day like after work and it'll be like 22 like wait a minute what the hell happened here like it was i don't understand it's like well it's search pricing like they and like on top of that they know what you're willing to pay. So they might make it, like, I'm so cheap. Like, Amazon knows better. Amazon knows better than to even take me to the luxury section of Amazon. They just know better, right? Like, I am always out for a bargain. It'll sit in my cart forever, unless it's cheaper than, you know, regular price, right? So anyway, like, Maryland legislated anyway from the 1st of October, which is next week, a Maryland law bans large grocery stores from setting prices based on surveillance of individual shoppers. And some Democratic senators have a bill in Congress that would ban electronic shelf labels in big grocery stores altogether. And because everything gets weaponized against the consumer, I don't think that's a bad thing. There, I said it.

Marc: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's it seems like I'm not sure what the use case is for electronic shelf labels are, like, does it make it, I don't know, that much easier to rearrange your shelves?

Renee: Well, I mean, well, think about it, right? So I just got a bunch of pricing stuff and I'm Walmart. Like, those are big stores with a lot of stuff in them.

Marc: Right?

Renee: And so instead of going around and saying, okay, now, you know, this price went up, then you just, what you do is you upload that CSV of all that pricing information into the platform that is actually managing all this crap that's on, the shelves and it just changes it all right but what's crappy is is that like, there it's actually changing it when you get up to the till because it knows what you're willing to pay like that's what, like it's that individualized right like it's it's the idea that like i know what you're willing to pay i know what you're willing to shut up and i know on thursday she'll spend on this particular thursday the third thursday of the month you already got your direct deposit so you're willing to spend more so i'm gonna jack up the prices that's the kind of crap they're pulling, right? Like you cannot do that stuff. That's just, it's uncalled for.

Marc: It's just so funny. Like we talked way back in like, I don't know, episode three or something like that. We talked about Sears and Amazon and that, and the, the, the innovation, the big innovation that's the Sears catalog brought was fixed pricing, you know? So 120, 130 years ago, So fixed pricing wasn't a thing until Sears made it a thing. And now we're moving back to not fixed pricing, you know?

Renee: But you don't even give me a chance. Like, if it's not fixed pricing, okay, then I get to barter or I get to negotiate, right? Yeah, exactly. Like, no, I don't get to negotiate. You're just going to jack it up on me. You're never going to, like, charge me less for it. Like, let's just talk about it, right? Like, you're never going to charge me less for it. So it's only going to go up. And I have no way to negotiate that with you. So it just jives the whole way around.

Marc: This is why I built the agents that can negotiate with each other. And I just, yeah, anyways. Okay. Some other time. All right. In a couple of places, the barcode is, it was just supposed to be like another like low stress, like not angry episode, you know?

Renee: It never turns out that way, though. I know. It always ends up being like somebody just did bad things with it or wrong or unethical things with it. And that's where we always end up.

Marc: So I just give up. Well, especially when we get to the future part of it, you know?

Renee: Right.

Marc: Like the future is pretty freaking bleak.

Renee: Right. Right? How much more money do you want to take off me? Like, I already don't have any. Like, how much more do you want to, like, let's keep going. I don't know.

Marc: All right. So, but, okay, a couple of places the barcode is losing ground. Walmart tried to make its biggest suppliers put radio frequency ID tags, RFID, on pallets back in 2003. I remember that. And then backed away a few years later and then did it again. Because the tags cost somewhere between 40 cents and a dollar each. And the suppliers were the ones that were paying. But they have that kind of power. So, you know, whatever. The tags are down to like five cents now. They're pretty cheap. And Walmart has come back to RFID first, excuse me, first on clothing and since last October on Fresh Meat, Bakery, and Deli. A radio tag can be read without anyone pointing a scanner at it. A printed barcode still costs next to nothing, which is why it's still on almost everything else. The cameras that were meant to replace the checkout altogether haven't gone to plan either.

Renee: Amazon's you gave me this one just walk out system just cameras and sensors so you could pick up things and leave without scanning anything this was you saw them in airports that's where i used to see them and you would just walk in uh you'd open you you'd open the amazon app on your phone and when you walked in it read it read that account and it's like oh i know who you are right and then and then it you know. You walked around and you picked stuff up, right, and put them in your cart and you left with them and it billed you for it. In 2024, Amazon took out of its big fresh grocery stores the information, the subscription tech news site, reported that a large number of workers in India were reviewing footage behind the scenes. And Amazon disputed that and called the reporting false. Now, now, now, there were tons of cameras that were watching you pick things up. Now, who's to say there wasn't a person sitting in a call center somewhere who saw you walk through the door, your account number, your account information popped up on their screen because they know it's you. And now they're watching you pick things up and they're charging you for it. They're dropping it in your car. I mean, how is that? How hard is that to think that that's how it worked? Right. Like, and I remember this. I remember this being a big deal. And so they disputed it. They called it false. The replacement was a smart shopping cart. And on the newer ones, you hold each item up to a barcode scanner on the cart. And he goes, right, right, because now it has to read. So how the hell was it doing it before, right? If I have to hold it up, like, how was it doing it? Oh, wait a minute. I know how it was doing it. People in India were watching me. And so, okay, so in January this year, Amazon said it was closing its Fresh and Go stores altogether because they can't seem to get out of the whole India's buying it for me thing.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, like, it's just so funny because those stores were meant to be opened and, like, be this sort of next evolution, you know, next step into the evolution of the grocery store where, you know, the checkout experience was completely invisible, you know? Yeah, frictionless.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: And, you know, and it's just... Yeah. I mean, so when I was at Verifold, we started working on this stuff. Like it wasn't like that was, you know, that was years and years ago. And, you know, we were able to make some of it work with some of the technology we had. But, you know, the thing, and this is what happened with Amazon, like if you go to the shelf and you pick one thing up, you know, it thinks, okay, that's what I got. But then if you put the thing back, you know, in a different place and then you pick something else up, like it can be confused very easily, you know, and people were figuring out how to game the system.

Renee: Because I picked up something expensive, put it down on a shelf that looked cheap. Right. And then took it again. But it billed me for whatever was on that. Not the roast that I took.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, it's very interesting how it all played out. But then what do they do? They just, they go to a shopping cart with a scanner.

Renee: My God. Well, they tried to get you to do that at home too. What was the name of the super like barcode scanner they gave you at home? You were supposed to inventory everything in your, in your house. And then as you used it, you know, it would put it on a list, but you needed to scan it when you were using it too. So you scanned it when you brought it in and you scanned it when you throw it out. And then somehow there's some spreadsheet somewhere that's telling, like, it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. All of it was dumb.

Marc: It was just dumb. Anyways. All right. So in 1974, a laser under the counter in one volunteer supermarket in Troy, Ohio, read a pack of gum. Juicy fruit. Today, GS1 counts more than 10 billion scans a day across more than 2 million companies in around 150 countries. The reader went from a laser bolted into a checkout, to a gun in a warehouse worker's hand, to a camera in every phone, to robots reading codes off the warehouse floor, and each step made it faster and cheaper to read a code, so more things got one.

Renee: And the label got bigger in what it holds. It started with a 12 digits that identified a can of soup. And a code on a battery in Europe next year will tell you what it's made of and how to recycle it. The argument in 1974 was about shoppers losing the sticker and not being able to see what they were paying. The argument now, with screens on the shelves, is whether the price you're shown is the same price as the person next to you.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. I know, crazy. If you remember your local shop getting its first scanner or remember the price stickers going, write to us at the Nostalgic Nerds or just NostalgicNerdsPodcast at gmail.com. How can I mess up my own email address? I don't know. We'd like to hear who held out the longest.

Renee: This is the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, share this with someone who still reads the numbers under the barcode or even better yet is afraid of them. I'd like to meet that person. I'd like to meet the person terrified of barcodes who still thinks there's 666 in them. If you know someone like that, put them in touch with me. I'd love to just meet them. And don't forget, Nostalgic Nerds has great merch.

Marc: Go check it out. Go check out the merch.

Renee: Yeah, we'll see you next time. Thanks, Mark.

Marc: All right, thanks.