Bar codes that changed retailing are 35 years old

If you can recall this quaint practice, you've reached middle age -- or more.

Remember when grocery items such as Spam, Kool-Aid and Velveta Cheese each had a price tag attached? When at the checkout stand, the cashier manually punched in the cost for each article on elevated register keys akin to old typewriters?

That all changed on the morning of June 26, 1974, when the first bar code was scanned on a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

Today, bar codes are scanned more than 10 billion times a day for everything from boarding planes to tracking packages. And after 35 years, they are both the mundane minutiae of modern life and cultural icons of cold efficiency, identification and control.

The design back then was straightforward -- 59 black and white bars. And the inventors' objectives were simple enough, too -- to speed up the grocery checkout line and give supermarkets a new tool to track their stock.

The codes did save many hours of labor, said Ladell Loosli, 56, who worked at Smith's grocery store in Brigham City before the technology became available. He remembers using a label gun or a stick marker to stamp prices on products. And whenever a product had a price change, "it was a beast.

"We had to use hairspray, a paper towel or steel wool to get the stamped prices off," he said.

The bar codes of today help people with diabetes calibrate glucose meters and researchers study

the pollination habits of bees. They even played a role in the 1992 presidential race, when the elder George Bush, running for re-election against Bill Clinton, seemed at a campaign stop to be puzzled by what had long been a technological staple of everyday life.

"It was cheap and it was needed," said George Laurer, who was already a veteran engineer at IBM in 1970 when he was asked to lead a team assigned to devise a checkout system for grocery stores. "And it is reliable. Those three things probably contributed more than anything else."

Laurer, now 84, recalled that several designs, including a circular symbol, were considered before the team settled on what today is recognized as the Universal Product Code, the name of the familiar format.

Bar codes are one of the most revolutionary innovations in the past half century in the grocery industry, said James Olsen, president of the Utah Retail Merchants Association. But the adoption was gradual. For years, businesses were hamstrung by shoppers who refused to buy bar-coded products.

"People were afraid that they'd get cheated at the cash register," he said. "And when they got home, they couldn't remember if the price on the receipt was correct because without the old price tags on merchandise, they couldn't remember what it was supposed to cost in the first place."

Today, the bar code is being challenged by newer and more sophisticated competitors. Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is one such technology.

RFID uses the same technology as dashboard toll collectors and building access key cards and allows businesses to identify and track specific items without a direct line of sight. But even as big players such as Wal-Mart and Procter and Gamble have pushed ahead with the RFID technology, the cautious retail business, in particular, has pushed back, in part because of concerns about price.

Bar codes, after all, cost just half a cent each, while the electronic tags used in RFID cost more than 5 cents each. As a result, a significant portion of Wal-Mart's suppliers rejected its mandate to adopt the newer technology.