Grocery Industry Solicits Proposals
In 1970, the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) created a committee to determine if item identification was viable. The IBM team completed a version of their UPC code in 1971 and submitted their design when the committee asked for proposals in 1972.
There were seven finalists, including the code Woodland and Silver had devised on a beach decades prior. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) owned the patent at that point and submitted a proposal using the bull’s-eye code. However, as the IBM team knew, it posed issues.
“Anytime you have a circle of lines as opposed to straight bars, the circles, by the fact that they have to go all the way around and you have so many of them, they take up more space. And it’s very hard to control from a printing point of view,” McEnroe says, explaining printers would often spit out the round codes smudged at the edges.
Woodland had even called McEnroe to let him know that he didn’t want the bull’s-eye code to win. At the time, Woodland was working for IBM in New York and offered to join the Consumer Transaction Systems team. “He came to Raleigh, and he greatly supported us in getting our code selected,” McEnroe says.
As the committee continued to deliberate, the IBM team continued to innovate on its design to make it more precise. McEnroe proposed that the committee use new modifications it had made and claim the code as its own. Eventually, that’s what the committee did, and the UPC code was ready to launch.
A Rocky UPC Rollout
The IBM team created hardware and software that made the barcode possible. However, when it came to rolling out the technology, there were a few challenges. The IBM team had to hire a company to prove that the laser scanners wouldn’t harm people. Also, when McEnroe sent engineers to a store in Tysons Corner, Virginia to debut the technology, labor union picketers, who worried UPCs would lead to job losses, didn’t let them inside. There was also Carol Tucker-Foreman, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, who wanted to preserve individual item pricing because she argued that it took away consumers’ ability to shop comparatively.
“Carol Tucker-Foreman almost immediately began a nationwide battle against barcode adoption,” Frith says. “There were senate hearings. She held town halls. She did debates.”
“Eighteen states, as I counted at the time, passed laws against using the scanner in the store without removing the prices,” McEnroe says. “In other words, they would let you use a scanner, but they would not let you remove the price from the item. And, of course, removing the price from the item was one of the big cost advantages that the supermarkets were using to pay for the equipment in the first place.”
Consumer backlash against the barcode eventually subsided and, by the early 1980s, more and more grocery stores began adopting the technology. By 1989, barcodes were used in more than half of all U.S. grocery sales.
A Legacy of Efficiency
While McEnroe calls the invention of the UPC code a team effort, he argues that if any one person deserved recognition, it was Laurer, who was inducted into the Engineering Innovation Hall of Fame for his invention. Meanwhile, the UPC Code went on to become used internationally and change the way people shop, and making it possible for superstores with countless products to exist.
While McEnroe and his team couldn’t have fathomed just how widespread the barcode would become, he thinks it’s a positive that no one became rich off of the barcode patent. To submit the code to the NAFC, every entity had to agree to forego ownership.
“The supermarket institute had the vision to say that it had to be in the public domain,” he says. “These were just really good, top-notch engineers that rolled up their sleeves, came to work every morning, and just tried to figure out how to make this thing work better and more effectively for everybody in the world.”