I am Bar Code Aware

I notice bar codes.

I became aware of the whole bar code / UPC (Universal Product Code) symbol technology in the mid-to-late '70s. I sorta knew what a UPC symbol was. I was mildly interested when the local supermarket installed those "red laser" bar code scanners. The things that people used to say "don't look directly into that thing! You'll burn your retinas out!" It was one of those things that comforted me as a kid that the world was indeed progressing. That technology would get me that flying jetback soon. Of course, this is from a kid that grew up in a house that had stacks and stacks of my dad's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics lying about. Growing up in that kind of environment gave me an outlook that expected these things out of society. I mean, I couldn't think up this stuff myself. But I wasn't struck dumb in amazement at technological advances. My attitude was more of "hey, cool idea. It's about time they thought of that."

There is the famous "story" about George Bush, Sr. and bar code technology. Bush was on one of those photo op campaign trips that had him out meeting the people and letting them show the President what they do at work. He was a supermarket trade show and was being shown a bar code scanner for a checkout. He said the he "was amazed by some of the technology". Of course, Bush-haters in the media (the original Bush-haters) ran with the story that Bush, Sr. was so out of touch with everyday life that he didn't even know what a checkout scanner was. They put forth the idea that since Bush had been Vice-President and President for such a long time, he had become pampered and coddled to the point where he didn't have any idea how the average American citizen lived. As some of you may or may not remember, Bush was not reelected. Make of that what you will. Whether Bush was actually familiar with common bar code scanner technology or not, what he was actually being shown was a new type of scanner and back-end database that was able to determine the product from a torn or partially obscured UPC label. And, for that time, that was amazing technology. But the damage was done and that story is pointed to by many as part of the downfall of Bush's reelection chances. Of course, losing master media manipulator Lee Atwater didn't help either.

Ok, where was I? Oh, yeah, bar codes.

At my former job I became much more involved with bar codes. I worked for a leather goods imported right at the beginnings of the office superstore boom. The company originally sold briefcases and daily planners to luggage and specialty stores. Real Mom-and-Pop operations. Just as I joined the company, one of the buyers from Office Depot decided to take a chance on some items from the product line. Well, Office Depot doesn't dick around with their supply chain. They wanted to be able to order something and have it be in their stores with the least human intervention possible. They had very strict bar code and labelling requirements so they could receive and process inventory as quickly as possible. So I had to learn all about bar codes and UPC's.

On a typical bar code that you'd see in the store in the U.S., I know that the first half of a bar code number indicates the type of product and the company who makes it. In the U.S. a company can obtain a unique six digit company identification number by becoming a member of the Uniform Code Council. The last half of the bar code is a unique identifier for that particular product and product characteristic. For example, if a two different briefcases are identical in features except for the color, then you need a unique code for each color. The last digit in a bar code is a called a check digit and it is calculated by the following formula:

See. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, me neither. I mean, when will I ever use this information again... except for a journal entry?

I hear you saying "so you're aware of bar codes. Big deal. How does that affect your daily life?" Oooo, I'm so glad you asked that question! When I check out of any store, I compulsively make sure that the UPC bar code is in the most accessible place for the checkout person to scan it. I can't help it. I don't know if it is for their benefit or mine. I mean, I'd like to think I'm a nice person and I like to assist my fellow man in their endeavors to provide for themselves and their families. But at the same time, nothing burns my ass more than waiting in a checkout line while a minimum wage-earning, Britney Spears-listening drone flips a product over three times before she can find the bar code. I figure that if I sit that product on the counter with that UPC shining up in their lifeless face, I'm out of that store that much faster, making my transaction as painless as possible for both of us. Of course, that hasn't stopped some of these idiots from picking up the thing I'm buying and flipping the product around looking for the UPC code that I already found for them.

Another thing that bothers me about bar codes and the losers who use them is that they don't know what they are for. Most checkout people just see the bar code as the thing that means they don't have to actually enter numbers into a cash register and possibly break a big, fake, acrylic nail (I'm being kind of sexist here. I'm picking on female cashiers here when, in reality, some of the dumbest people on the planet are the dudes behind the counter). Back to the topic. The bar code is so much more than just a price entry device. Just as important is that it keeps track of a store's inventory. Everytime Joe Scanboy runs my Diet Coke over those red lines, some binary bits of data gets flipped from 0 to 1 and they've got one less unit in inventory. When the store's quantity of Diet Coke hits a magical minimum number, a reorder gets issued. Or it should anyway. For a store's supply chain to be truly efficent, their computers need to tally up all those transactions and come up with totals of what product sold, what product needs replenishing and what product sucks so bad that it won't sell no matter what.

That's why it drives me nuts when I get behind the "cat lady" in the express line of a supermarket. She's got 24 cans of assorted flavors of cat food in her basket but gets in the 12 items or less (the grammar there is wrong, but that's another rant) aisle because she thinks that since her cans of cat food is just one type of item it would be OK to get her feline-urine smelling self in front of me. No, No, NO! Each one of those cans needs to be scanned to make the store's inventory accurate! And that will make me wait. And we can't have that. But then the brain-dead person behind the register will do something insane and scan in one can of Little Friskies Salmon Surprise and then hit X 24. So I'm moving right along in the Express Checkout lane, but now am strangely upset by the ignorance of the cashier ruining the entire supply chain system set up by the store.

It is entirely possible that I might be insane.

But my rules work for me. I am a hero at my local 7-11 for my bar code flipping ways. The owner-operator guy there noticed me turning all the products so that the bar codes faced him and his scanner. He looked at me for a minute and then broke out in a big grin and said "thank you." He called over the other guy and pointed out what I had done and said that "it was real class". Now everytime I go in there, he points it out to one of his other employees, his vendors, or sometimes other customers. He really appreciates the effort to make his job easier. It has paid off. Every once in awhile, he has given free Slurpees to Jake and Bobby. Of course, now I can't NOT do it. Now the pressure is on everytime to do it. I can't win.