Or rather how scanners could make huge profits for stores that converted from mechanical checkout to scanners. Well not really….

When developing the specifications for the barcode and symbol one had to determine what would be an acceptable undetected error rate (UDE). In order to do this a simple survey was made to determine the error rate made by checkers keying in the price of each item. Men were sent to the parking lots of several stores chosen at random. These men would offer a shopper leaving the market with a large basket of items, a small payment ($10 as I remember it) to allow them to check their items against the receipt. What they found was that there was usually one or more errors in every one hundred items sold. Not surprising was that most of the errors were in the customer’s favor; I guess those in the store’s favor were caught by the customer and corrected.

It was reasoned that if a scanning system had less than 1 UDE in 1,000 items that the result would result in a modest gain for the market. The first time I was briefed on the specification orally I was told that to be safe, the UDE specification was raised to 1 UDE in 10,000 scans but when I received the written criterion it had again been changed upward to 1 UDE in 20,000 scans.

Before making our proposal to the Symbol Selection Committee, Dave Savir made an in depth mathematical model of my barcode & symbol. One of the conclusions in his published paper was one would expect a UDE of less than 1 in 100,000. WOW! I was overjoyed.

After the announcement of the IBM 3660 U.P.C. Barcode Scanning System on October 11, 1973 and through 1974 one of my responsibilities was to encourage the Source Marking of the symbol. One of several activities to accomplish this was a series of Seminars for Grocery Manufacturers, and people in the Printing and Packaging industries designed to reduce the fear of problems with the tightly prescribed definitions for the edges of bars, etc. At the same time we could point out other significant parts of the complete Symbol Specification that might not be getting the attention it needed. These seminars were very popular. Our briefing room which might handle 6 to 12 people for a Grocery Retailer briefing would be reconfigured classroom style and used to handle 30 - 40 Manufacturer Packaging related attendees.

One of the specification parts sometimes overlooked was the color guidance near the back of the book. Grocery scanners being Helium-Neon lasers were red light. Users were counseled to view symbols under a Kodak Wratten #26 filter. We had been shown red bars on a white milk carton and black bars on a green package of gum. Red on white will look all white and black on green looks all black in red light.

These are a few memories of experiences I had during the late sixties and early seventies. I hope you enjoy it...

George T. Reed
Graphic Superintendent (1961-1989)
Westvaco Corporation
Newark, Delaware

The earliest known effort to identify grocery products by numbers began in 1932. Wally Flint, a student at Harvard University wrote a master?s thesis, The Universal Product Code (UPC) describing a numbered metal tag on grocery products. His thesis was the beginning of the ?bar code.?

In the early 1960's a representative of IBM, located at Research Triangle, North Carolina, was browsing through the Harvard library and happened to notice Wally Flint?s thesis. The procedure came to life with the development of IBM's modern grocery check-out counter and several other manufacturer?s hand-held (laser) scanners. Using this new technology, supermarkets could easily maintain inventory data and the check-out counters could be automated.

UPC Almost Did Not Happen.

At an early meeting of the Paperboard Packaging Council (PPC) in Washington, D.C., the plant manager of Weyerhauser (a carton printing company in Pennsauken, New Jersey) said his plant printed millions of milk cartons daily by flexography (rubber plates with raised images). He stated they could not print the UPC and maintain the straight lines and spaces required because the rubber flexography plates would deform under printing pressure.