Technology Moves Forward at the Grocery Store

Thirty years and more ago, your local grocery store used cash registers. Prices were marked on all items; the checker punched that price into the cash register and the total was calculated much like a desktop calculator with a paper tape.

Although the first patent for a bar code type product was issued in October, 1952, and the first bar code used commercially in 1966, it wasn't until 1970 that an industry standard was set. By 1970, the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC) was written; this evolved into the Universal Product Code (UPC) in 1973. In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. [ref: The History of Bar Code]

Still, those first bar-code-scanners fed into a system that worked a lot like the earlier cash register. For a long time, the sales receipt simply read something like this:

Grocery   .59
Grocery  1.09  Tx
Grocery  2.15
Grocery   .59

After a number of years went by, people got smarter and started to put the item information into a data base so the receipts became more descriptive, if a bit cryptic.

Crm Mush Soup   .59
Palmoliv Liq   1.09  Tx
Deli           2.15
Crm Mush Soup   .59

There was still, however, very little difference between the scanner / computer system and the early cash registers. Nevertheless, people keep improving things.

Our neighborhood grocery recently installed a new system that provides a major jump forward in receipt technology. This is the first time I've seen all of my purchases sorted and categorized on the receipt. Regardless of the order in which the checker scanned the items, everything is neatly organized on the receipt. Even if one can of soup falls into the bottom of the cart and is scanned last, it will be listed with the rest of the soup. I like that.

As a slightly different case, the Target department stores print a bar code on the bottom of every receipt. If I want to return something, the customer service checker scans the item and the receipt and Poof! the money is back in my Target Visa account without my even needing to reach for my wallet.

We're well past the point where the computerized register system is a simple model of what we used to do before we had computers. Now we're moving into the stage where we can exploit the abilities of the computer, the database, and the programmer, to provide functionality that would have been difficult, time consuming, or expensive 20 years ago. It makes me wonder what might be next.

Technology Moves Forward at the Grocery Store ( in category Random Thoughts , SciTech ) - posted at Sun, 12 Dec, 18:26 Pacific | «e»