Hype around new technologies often follows a predictable pattern. We're told that a new technology is going to change the world, but when it doesn't make an immediate impact, it's often deemed a failure. Take Google Glass, for example. It promised a bold, slightly goofy vision of the future, but ultimately failed in an embarrassing way. Often, the story ends there, and the graveyards of technology history are filled with failed projects. But some of the world's most successful technologies have followed the same pattern, but they also survived what research firm Gartner calls the “trough of disillusionment,” and people tend to eventually forget those early struggles. The example that most clearly illustrates this pattern is the modern barcode, a technology that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2010.Number Birthday in 2023.
Barcodes are one of the most successful technologies in history. 6 billion barcodes scanned every dayMost people rarely think about barcodes because they've been everywhere for so long. I'm 41 years old and grew up in a world where barcodes are everywhere: on nearly every product I bought, every ticket I scanned, every package that arrived on my doorstep. As podcaster Roman Mars says, “It's hard to imagine a world without barcodes.”
It wasn't until I began archival research for my book on the cultural history of the barcode that I realized how close we were to a world not framed by those iconic vertical black lines. Before the barcode became so ingrained in our lives that we barely noticed it, it experienced a dramatic “trough of disillusionment” filled with massive consumer protests, legislative hearings, and moments that came close to catastrophic failure.
Barcode technology was first patented in 1949, but the barcode we know today has its roots in a 1970s effort spearheaded by the grocery industry. By the late 1960s, grocers were facing serious challenges, including rising labor costs and difficulty tracking inventory. Barcodes seemed like one solution, and the industry created a task force in the early 1970s to develop a working barcode system. The committee created the Universal Product Code (UPC), a data standard that is still used in U.S. grocery stores today. The data standard specifies what each digit in the barcode represents, but the standard was designed to work with many different types of barcode symbols, so the committee had to decide which type of symbol to use. The committee narrowed it down to seven finalists, most of which people today would not recognize as barcodes. After three years of deliberations, the committee selected IBM's proposal, and 50 years later, that IBM symbol has become synonymous with the word “barcode.” By 1974, the committee's work was nearly complete and the UPC barcode was ready for implementation.
For a while, barcodes seemed like they would make it onto products without a hitch. On June 26, 1974, the first UPC barcode was scanned on a package of Wrigley's gum at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. The event went well, the barcode worked, and the grocery store's executives were happy, but a crisis was already looming. Despite years of consultation with various stakeholders, the task force had in particular ignored one group: consumers. As a subsequent industry report noted, “consumer concerns had been inadequately addressed and underestimated from the earliest stages of planning,” with serious consequences throughout the 1970s.
The backlash began essentially immediately after the UPC was established. In the summer of 1974, The Phil Donahue Show aired an episode warning that the grocery industry was using bar codes to deceive consumers. Outrage only grew from there. In one particularly notable example in late 1974, recounted by engineer Paul V. McEnroe, who helped develop UPC, protesters gathered outside a Giant supermarket in Tysons Corner, Virginia, that had installed a bar code system, temporarily halting the store's opening. Consumer concern was so great that a meeting was held at Middlesex University in November 1974 to deal with the unexpected backlash. The grocery industry had not anticipated the consumer backlash, especially not Carol Tucker Foreman, a woman who grocery executives would later admit was a “formidable opponent” they were not prepared to fight, and it was quite a fight.
Tucker Foreman was president of the Consumers Federation of America and began a nationwide campaign against the adoption of bar codes as soon as the technology was introduced. In December 1974, she testified before the U.S. Senate at a Symposium on the Universal Product Coding System, complaining that consumers' opinions had not been solicited and arguing that bar codes would harm customers. Her campaign grew from there, warning people about bar codes in countless interviews throughout the mid-1970s. She hosted numerous public debates with grocery store executives, and according to a 1975 Salt Lake Tribune article, they engaged in “verbal exchanges.”
The main controversy surrounding the introduction of barcodes has centered around an issue that may seem a bit odd in retrospect: item-level pricing. Before the advent of barcodes, every item in a grocery store had a price tag. Labeling each item with a price tag required a lot of labor, and one of the main reasons grocers developed UPC barcodes was to reduce the labor costs required for item-level pricing and instead display product prices on the shelves.
Tucker Foreman argued that the elimination of item-level pricing would be a disaster for consumers and, to quote a 1975 interview, would “completely remove the consumer's privilege of comparison shopping.” The grocery industry tried to compromise by giving people grease pencils that they could use to write prices on items, but the idea didn't work, to say the least. In a 1975 interview with the Central New Jersey News, Tucker Foreman derided the grease pencil idea as “a classic 'nother world' attitude from the industry. On the PR equivalence scale, it's the same as 'let them eat cake.'”
CFA's campaign to retain item-level pricing and delay the adoption of bar codes garnered national attention, and other consumer groups began publishing pamphlets on bar codes with titles such as “The New Supermarket Scam.” Most importantly, consumer groups began to make a concerted effort to pass legislation mandating the retention of item-level pricing. Several states, including California, passed laws temporarily preserving item-level pricing.
The grocery industry's official position was that it was up to each store to choose whether to move to shelf pricing. Behind the scenes, industry executives demonstrated just how big a threat a backlash had become, orchestrating editorials like one in Fortune magazine in 1978 that dismissed local protests and boycotts as “wars on local Luddites” and that mostly occurred only in stores in “unenlightened areas.”
In retrospect, the debate over whether to put price tags on products or on shelves may seem pretty abstract to those of us who grew up with shelf-level pricing. But this debate was by no means irrelevant to the future of barcoding. Early barcode and computerized checkout systems were hugely expensive, costing approximately $250,000 per store to implement. The most optimistic estimates predicted that it would take about three years for a grocer to recoup the cost of the system through reduced labor and inventory costs.
As a result, the only way bar codes would become feasible is if companies could save enough money to justify the cost of the system. Giant Foods president Joseph Danzanski made this point clear in 1976 testimony, saying that legislation maintaining item-level pricing would influence whether grocers would stick to their plans to introduce bar codes and computer checkouts. As a result, had consumer groups been successful in passing federal legislation maintaining item-level pricing, the introduction of bar codes might have stalled altogether. The fight against consumer groups was that Serious.
Although no federal legislation on item-level pricing was passed, for about five years it seemed as though consumer concerns might halt the adoption of barcodes. Just two years after the first UPC barcode was scanned, Business Week published an article titled “Supermarket Scanners Fail,” declaring the barcode already a failure. By 1978, some grocery stores had abandoned plans to install barcode systems, and as a 1978 Lansing State Journal article noted, “industry insiders feel supermarket executives have lost enthusiasm for the systems.” Barcode adoption was very slow, with only 1% of U.S. grocery stores equipped with barcode scanners by the end of the 1970s, well below industry projections.
Barcodes survived the hard times of the 1970s. Consumer backlash had largely died down by the end of the decade, perhaps in part because Tucker Foreman, who had become the national face of the protest movement, stepped down as CFA president to become Under Secretary of Agriculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the early 1980s, adoption of barcodes in the grocery industry began to increase exponentially, and by 1989, more than half of all grocery sales in the United States used barcodes. Moreover, the grocery industry's eventual success led other industries, such as the Department of Defense and the Automotive Industry Action Group, to mandate barcode adoption in the mid-1980s.
The rest is history. By the early 1990s, barcodes had become a critical data infrastructure for everything from global supply chains to postal services to concert tickets. With billions of barcodes still scanned every day, barcodes have become so commonplace that the controversy of the 1970s has largely receded into history.
Today, the barcode’s early struggles are more than just a quirky historical footnote. They’re also an important reminder that technology adoption is rarely a linear process. People often expect new technologies to have an immediate impact, and when that doesn’t happen, they can be prematurely labeled a failure. Take virtual reality as a particularly long-running example. In the 1990s, technology columnists were predicting that VR was on its way to becoming mainstream. Renowned futurist Nicholas Negroponte predicted in 1993 that “within the next five years, more than one in 10 people will be wearing a head-mounted computer display while traveling on a bus, train or plane.” VR has since flopped quite spectacularly, only becoming somewhat mainstream in recent years.
We don't even have to leave the world of barcodes to find another example: QR codes. teeth Barcodes. They're a subset of a technology called 2D barcodes. They were invented in the mid-1990s but started popping up everywhere in the late 2000s, peaking in popularity, often for no reason. They then failed spectacularly, at least in the West, but took off so quickly in East Asia that articles came out in the mid-2010s confidently declaring “QR codes are dead.” Then, in the early days of the COVID pandemic, QR codes seemed to make a comeback, enjoying the success predicted over a decade ago.
Technology often comes close to failure before it finally succeeds. In the mid-1970s, newspapers were already writing tributes to barcodes. But two decades later, the Smithsonian Institution acquired a replica of a Wrigley's gum box, the first official product ever scanned with a UPC barcode. The random gum box's journey from a grocery store in Troy, Ohio, to the Smithsonian's collection in 1974 was a much more dangerous and rather controversial journey than most people would imagine. notice.
