On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum using something novel — the black and white stripes of a universal bar code. The ...

If he had followed instructions from his boss, George Laurer might never have succeeded in designing the Universal Product Code. In 1971, a supervisor at International Business Machines Corp. told the ...

Bar codes began without fanfare in 1967 when railroads introduced them to distinguish freight cars. Some railroads used them, more did not, and seven years passed before supermarkets brought the ...

Product bar codes were originally developed to help with inventory tracking and speed up checkout at grocery stores. The relative speed and ease of use of the bar code system, or Universal Product ...

Barcode technology makes real-time data collection possible. Despite the multitude of barcodes in existence today, universal product codes remain among the most useful to a small business. Because UPC ...

Bar codes turn 40 this week, but they aren’t over the hill yet. It was a Thursday morning when the first unique sticker of white and black lines facilitated the purchase of a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit ...