Lining up for bigger and better bar codes

It becomes official Saturday, a change that's been going on all over North America for much of the year.

'Fess up, though -- you haven't noticed. Who looks at bar codes? That's what scanners are for.

Still, it's pretty startling to realize that what may be the single most ubiquitous thing in modern society grows by more than 8 percent -- 8 percent! -- and you had no idea. Even worse, the change has to do with the United States adopting a European standard (don't tell Donald Rumsfeld).

The Universal Product Code, or UPC -- the North American version of the bar code, that all-knowing, all-embracing set of black lines and numbers that identifies millions of items, from convenience store candy bars to Red Cross blood donations -- has been gaining a digit, going from 12 to 13, so as to conform with its Old World counterpart, the European Article Numbering Code, or EAN.

Known as 2005 Sunrise, the changeover aims to have all US and Canadian scanners able to read 13-digit codes by Jan. 1.

"In many ways, this change isn't such a big deal," says Stephen A. Brown, author of a book about bar coding, "Revolution at the Checkout Counter," and former counsel to the Uniform Code Council, the nonprofit organization that oversees the UPC.

"All of the surveys that the UCC has done indicate that compliance is either in place or will be in place at a level sufficiently high to say it's a success," Brown says. "The marketplace will move it."

The marketplace will move it because bar codes drive the marketplace.

Today, more than 1 million companies employ bar codes in 141 countries, and the UCC estimates that more than 10 billion bar codes are scanned daily worldwide. A 1999 PriceWaterhouseCoopers study estimated that in domestic retail sales bar coding annually saved companies and consumers $17 billion. Overall, it's believed the UPC has saved consumers, retailers, and manufacturers more than a trillion dollars over the past three decades.

It's been a big year for the UPC. Besides gaining an extra digit, it celebrated its 30th anniversary. A supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, swiped a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit through a scanner on June 26, 1974. The price rang up correctly, 67 cents, and the rest is history -- so much history that both scanner and gum now reside in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

"I tell people that they sleep well at night" because of bar codes, says Peter Abell, a founder and senior partner of the ePC Group, a Boston-based technology advisory firm. "It doesn't matter whether you're in Russia or Africa or China, you see the bar code in products. I say 'see,' though in general people never notice."

Why should they? Do people notice the air they breathe? Bar codes long ago became as integral to the economy -- as much a part of our way of life -- as the atmosphere is to nature.

"I'm not sure there is anything comparable in utility or impact," says Brown. "They are inescapable." From library books to lift passes to bridal registries to beekeeping (yes, a Missouri-based company markets extremely small bar codes that can be glued to the backs of bees), bar codes are the tie that binds together modern society.

"Go back to Genesis and read about the Creation," says Alan L. Haberman, a UCC board member who as CEO of the local supermarket chain First National Stores played a key role in developing the UPC in the early 1970s. "God says I will call the night 'night,' I will call the heavens 'heaven.' Naming was important. Then the Tower of Babel came along and messed everything up. In effect, the UPC has put everything back into one language, a kind of Esperanto, that works for everyone. Whether you're in Europe or Asia, it's there, a commonly understood sense to naming."

It may seem incongruous that Haberman's involvement in setting up the UPC sprang from his being a supermarket executive. In fact, the implementation of bar coding began with groceries.

Bar codes were invented in 1949. Two engineers, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, had the idea of vertically extending the dots and dashes of Morse code. This evolved into the bars-and-spaces format still used today. A patent was issued in 1952.

In 1969, supermarket chains joined together to come up with a method to speed checkout times and cut costs. Ten different formats were considered, including color-coded and bull's-eye styles. "The technology people all wanted the bull's-eye, which could be read a lot easier by a scanner," recalls ePC's Abell, who was on the committee that helped decide which format to use. Bars were less expensive, though, so that was the choice.

"Like all great ideas," says Brown of UPC, "it's very simple in both its concept and application. The bar code itself is dumb. It's a license plate. All it does is it points you to a database."

It was slow going initially. That first day, at the Troy supermarket, the system crashed. Early scanners cost $10,000 (back when $10,000 really was $10,000). BusinessWeek ran an article in 1976 headlined "The Supermarket Scanner That Failed." Shaw's was the first local chain to use the UPC, but it took a while before they had much company. Nearly a decade after scanners were introduced, fewer than 30 percent of US supermarkets were using them.

But if it was grocers who got the UPC going, other retailers guaranteed its success. "The reason it took off," Abell says, "was Wal-Mart and Kmart and Bullocks. Those three retailers decided they were going to use the bar code, in 1984. Suddenly it took off."

There's no small irony to Wal-Mart taking its time adopting the UPC. In many ways, bar codes are the foundation of the company's enormous success. They allow it to keep track of inventory to an unprecedented degree -- and give the company a trove of sales data that provides it with enormous leverage over suppliers. "The concept of just-in-time ordering and delivering is a reality because of bar coding," says Brown.

The switch to 13 digits is a tribute to the success of bar coding. The bar code is such a global phenomenon that the need for worldwide standardization is overdue. (The Europeans set up their 13-digit format in 1977, needing the extra number to accommodate the multiple user nations in what was then the European Community.) It's also a case of simply needing more numbers: There are 1 trillion 12-digit combinations, but so great is the demand for bar codes that's not enough.

Which means, of course, that North American consumers may have another changeover awaiting them. Companies are already being urged to implement the 14-digit bar codes of the Global Trade Identification Number and Global Location Number.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.