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Bar Coding The World Away
778790 writes "The Bar Code, long used for inventory classification and sometimes feared as a tool of social engineering, has been regulated in the name of globalization, and the globe has defeated the United States. Bar Codes in America will now have more digits, to match the global bar code standard: the European Article Numbering Code."
In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed at a Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's Gum.
Speak truth to power.
Arbitrary length barcode standards do exist (EAN-128 for example), but they are complex beasts and great care must be taken to ensure both the creater and reader get everything exactly right. The UPC or EAN-13 have the advantage of being simple. There may be multiple barcodes on a box, but only one of them would be in the UPC/EAN-13 symbology. I suppose you could create a new symbology just for that, but every reader in existence would be obsolete.
In the end, that's what it boils down too: anything that would allow varying length would make way too much software and hardware obsolete. The cost/benefit would be astronimically bad.
Maybe in your experience that's the case, but by and large, the middle 10 digits contain the main information that a retailer would use. Digits 2-6 denote the manufacturer of the item, and 7-11 are the item's ID. Throughout the supply chain on the way to a retail store, unique logic can often be applied based on the manufacturer ID. They might read digits 2-6, for example, and that would determine a specific label that needs to be generated, which would use digits 7-11 to pull the item info. Now they'd need to adjust that logic to account for the extra digit.
Like someone else mentioned, it's not a difficult problem to solve, but the testing will just take a good deal of effort.
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First, we tend to call them "Imperial" measurements, after the guy that invented them, Bob Imperial*.
Everybody under the age of about 40 has always been taught metric units from birth, so many of us have no real life experience using purely imperial units. However, we have plenty of infrastructures that will probably never swap over to metric, even in 30/40 years' time when there will be very few imperial-only peeps left.
All "long"-distance road signs in Britain are in miles. A sign saying "Birmingham 17" would indicate that Birmingham is 17 miles away.
HOWEVER, "short"-distance road signs tend to use metric units. "Humps for 200m" is a innuendo-laden example.
Speed limit signs are always in mph. Mechanical car speedos are marked in mph, with kph usually on there in significantly smaller digits. Mechanical car odometers are always in miles, but the newer digital combo displays can show all information in any combination.
Babies are weighed at birth, and everybody knows that a five-pounder is light, 7's about right and 10's a Christmas turkey.
And yes, before you ask, cocks are usually measured in inches here too.
There are some Canute-style Imperial zealots in the UK however.
* This is not true.
This has meant that UPC-A barcodes can be scanned worldwide but EAN-13 barcodes produced in other countries could not be scanned in the U.S. because U.S. POS systems didn't understand the "extended" version (EAN-13). This meant that manufacturers outside the U.S. had to have an EAN-13 barcode for the "rest of the world" and a UPC-A barcode for the U.S.--U.S. manufacturers only needed a UPC-A barcode because it works worldwide.
The only thing that is changing here is a requirement that U.S. retailers use POS systems that are able to read an EAN-13 barcode and that their database support it (i.e. the code field must support 13 digits rather than just 12). This is so that a barcode produced in other parts of the world can be scanned in the U.S.
Thus it's not that UPC-A is being "retired"--it's just that U.S. retailers will be expected to be able to handle foreign barcodes.
You need to be a member of the Uniform Code Council to get your own manufacturer ID:
s hi p/need_upc.htm
http://www.uc-council.org/ean_ucc_system/member
I was apparently mis-informed about this when I worked for Acxiom.....and they move so much 'people' data around, I'd taken this as truth there...they ran into lots of problems of SS#'s being dupes for different peoples' records...
I was told that there used to be a real problem with the 'fake' SS card they used to put in new wallets...people were thinking that was the way they were assigned a SS number...and were using it as such. That one sounded so goofy, that it actually sounded plausible, but, thanks for the link above...I'll have to look into this some more..
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........