The Beep Heard Around the World
On June 26, 1974 at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio USA, a clerk passed the UPC bar code on a 10 Pak of Wrigley’s chewing gum over the scan window of a Datalogic Model A bar code scanner.
Datalogic made history that day by producing the first commercial barcode scan, and the now infamous good-read ‘beep’.
This first ‘beep’ signaled the beginning of the automatic data capture industry.
Since its first scan, the bar code has revolutionized the retail industry and caused rapid adoption of bar code technology to improve productivity and advance inventory management while, at the same time, reducing pricing errors and the physical strain on cashiers.
The same benefits have been realized upstream through the supply chain, from the factory floor to the retail outlet, while also creating huge waves in other industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, finance and entertainment.