By Rhia Chohan
There are some things that will never really change at the supermarket. The shop assistant will always be chewing a sneaky stick of gum and the front left wheel on your trolley will always be annoyingly wobbly.
Some things do change, however. Remember those sticky labels that were stuck on each individual item? Do you also remember when the labels fell off somewhere on the way to the checkout, leading to impatient shoppers drumming their fingers while you dashed back to find out the real price of your milk? And there was also that time you thought you had bagged a real bargain when you saw the chocolate biscuits that were only a penny, but it turned out some mischievous school kid had just swapped the price labels. Or were you one of those who had a part-time job at a corner shop or supermarket? Staff had to go through the laborious process of pricing each individual item with a label gun, before having to do them all over again the following day, because they were to be placed on the "offers" shelf.
The way we pay for our weekly grocery shop has changed significantly. We now pay with plastic as well as cash, and the pricing of items has been made a lot easier over the years with a simple yet effective system that still prevails today: barcodes.
The introduction of barcodes
Gone are the days of time-consuming price confusion. Nowadays the system is much more simple. The kind of barcode we are most familiar with is the linear barcode, which is made up of vertical strokes and resembles a fine-toothed comb. Also known as a one-dimensional barcode, this neat set of markings is a cost effective solution to reading data efficiently and accurately.
How barcode scanners work
Barcode readers decode the data by scanning a light source across the barcode and measuring the intensity of light reflected back by the white spaces, generating a signal. The signal is then decoded back to the original data. The newest scanners offer the latest technology and can amazingly read not only one dimensional barcodes but also two-dimensional barcodes, which come in formats like Aztec Code, Data Matrix and PDF417. These may all sound like the names of Star Wars robots, but the 2D barcode system allows for significantly more information to be stored about a product.
Barcode scanners and stock-taking
Barcodes now allow for easy price checking, as well as a full description of the product. Barcodes contain increasingly essential information and, even more importantly, allow businesses to keep an eye on the stock levels in warehouses. By linking this up to ordering systems, they can arrange for items to be automatically re-ordered once stock has dropped below a certain level. This helps to avoid situations of stock running out, prompting customers to go elsewhere for the services or products they require.
Reduce cost, save time - how barcodes help us become more efficient
The beauty of these systems is that product data can be changed on a central system, avoiding the costly and laborious business of altering old-style price labels. This can be very useful for promotions and end of season sales.
Barcodes have not only made life easier for supermarkets and shoppers. They now play a big part in the daily running of services we use on a regular basis, appearing on tickets, security passes and used by courier services for quick and efficient delivery of parcels.
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