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."

Comments

let me hit you with some knowledge

[spoonyfork]

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.

Re:Why not be smarter?

[MarkedMan]

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.

Re:Get me a rewrite...

[letxa2000]

12-digit UPC-A codes are automatically EAN-13 codes. When EAN-13 was deployed, they essentially pulled a Microsoft... they "embraced and extended" UPC-A. All UPC-A codes can be scanned by EAN-13 scanners because the EAN-13 is an extension of UPC-A. However, not all UPC-A scanners can automatically understand the extended EAN-13 barcodes.

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.