What a Barcode Holds
Written by Studio AM.
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In June 1974, a pack of chewing gum was scanned at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It became the famous first retail checkout scan of a Universal Product Code, or UPC. The code let the register identify the product and retrieve its price.
An ordinary UPC on a packaged product identifies the item; its selling price is held in the store's database. Keeping those separate makes price changes easier. Staff can update the database without replacing the product code on every pack. Shelf labels and other displayed prices still need to match what customers will be charged.
The scanner also helped make the store more observant. A checkout system could record which products sold and when, building a detailed picture of demand. Combined with stock records, these sales data could support reordering and show where supplies were running low.
The visible benefit was quicker identification at checkout. A less visible benefit was the connection between a standard product identifier and information stored elsewhere. The same printed code could support pricing, sales records, and inventory management without carrying all of those details in its stripes.
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Questions
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Question 1 of 4
What is the passage mainly about?
The answer is A: The barcode separated an item's identity from its price, and that split changed how stores work.
The passage explains how a product identifier can connect to pricing and other records without containing every detail.
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Question 2 of 4
Why can separating a product's code from its price reduce the work of a price change?
The answer is C: The database can change while the code printed on each pack stays the same.
The code continues to identify the same product, so the product code itself need not be replaced when the selling price changes.
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Question 3 of 4
In this passage, "observant" most nearly means
The answer is B: noticing and recording what happens
The next sentence explains the store noticing sales patterns through recorded transactions.
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Question 4 of 4
Which product was used for the famous first retail UPC checkout scan?
The answer is D: A pack of chewing gum.
The opening identifies a pack of chewing gum in Troy, Ohio.
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