Though now ubiquitous in retail, the UPC bar code got its start 50 years ago last month, when retailers and consumer goods companies first agreed in New York City to develop a standard for automated product recognition.
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| The bull's-eye was replaced with what is termed a "linear" bar code, because Laurer had determined that the bull's-eye design wouldn't work. |
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As noted last week by the GS1 organization, a standards group for a variety of technologies, on March 31, 1971, leaders from the biggest names in retail and consumer goods agreed to form a cross industry committee to develop some type of readable code.
Participants include including Heinz, General Mills, Kroger, and Bristol Myers.
That effort eventually led to the development of what we now know as the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code. It became a commercial reality just three years later when in 1974, the first bar code in retail was scanned at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, north of Dayton.
Decades later, the BBC named the resulting outcome as one of "the 50 things that made the world economy." SCDigest ranked the UPC bar code as the sixth greatest supply chain innovation of all time (See The Top Dozen Supply Chain Innovations of All-Time.)
But there is some back story to how things progressed from 1971 to 1974.
Even earlier, a booklet produced in 1966 by Kroger ended with a despairing wish for a better future: "Just dreaming a little, could an optical scanner read the price and total the sale. Faster service, more productive service is needed desperately. We solicit your help."
Kroger's business was groceries, not electronics, so the company went looking for a partner with the necessary expertise.
Kroger turned to RCA, which did indeed develop a solution using a circular bar code design first developed in the 1950s, and the first real-life test occurred at a Kroger store in Cincinnati. On July 3, 1972, the first automated checkout stands were installed.
In parallel with Kroger's effort, after the Symbol Committee was organized in 1971, it asked for proposals for a UPC design.
In the end, seven companies, all of them based in the United States, submitted systems to the Symbol Committee. RCA, having demonstrated to the committee its system in Cincinnati, thought it was the clear it would be the winner.
However, at the last minute, International Business Machines (IBM) made a surprise bid. Its bid was made by a company engineer named George Laurer.
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Laurer had been given a task by his manager: Write a proposal for grocery executives explaining how IBM would take a previously invented bar code pattern, in the shape of a bull's-eye, and make it work in supermarkets across the US.
 But with the manager on vacation, Laurer took a very different tack.
"I didn't do what you asked," he told the boss upon his return.
The bull's-eye was replaced with what is termed a "linear" bar code, because Laurer had determined that the bull's-eye design wouldn't work.
"My nature and my training would not allow me to support something I didn't believe in," Laurer said in a 2010 interview, according to the NPR web site. "I simply went against my manager's instruction and set out to design a better system."
In Raleigh, Laurer and a team of IBM engineers refined and tested the design.
When it came time to present to the team of grocery executives, Laurer said his boss "made it clear that if I was wrong or I could not sell the idea to the brass, it would end my career, not his. My arguments must have been persuasive."
In 1973, the grocery industry settled on the bar code design developed by Laurer and IBM.
The rest is bar code history. Lauer died in 2019.
Though like most innovations it started slow, between 1976 and 1980, the number of stores using IBM's bar code jumped from 104 to 2,207 to now 2 million companies on a global basis.
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