The grocery industry, which sells baskets full of cheaper goods, had a real incentive to make the checkout process easier, faster and more accurate. Most have numbers attached to them, others don't - like these packages of sugar in a Berlin supermarket Image: picture-alliance/dpa It was first used to buy a package of gum at a supermarket in Ohio in 1974. At the request of the grocery industry, and tweaking the earlier work of others, American engineer George Laurer headed a team that created the "universal product code," or UPC, and the necessary scanning equipment. The barcode is so universal it's hard to believe someone actually had to invent it. The barcode is a "compact, elegant and flexible solution," he added. Retailing might be simple, but it isn't easy," Jonathan Reynolds, academic director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management at Oxford University, told DW. "For all the talk of technological breakthroughs today, arguably the quiet triumph of 20th century technology for the retail sector has been the barcode. Barcodes make life easier and no one really notices them until the cashier can't scan one and has to - reluctantly - manually type in the product number. Zebralike, they greet shoppers at the toy store, are stuck to bananas at the grocers and Amazon could never deliver so many things without them. Their black vertical lines on a white backdrop are everywhere.
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