The Intelligence Behind Barcodes

By Author: Salvatore Andrea
Total Articles: 6261
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Barcodes have a long history, and since they came into widespread US use in the 1970s, it’s been hard to imagine life without them. Before barcodes were brought into retail, the prices of items being purchased had to be punched into cash registers manually. In the UK, by the mid-1980s, there were 100 stores using barcode scanning technology. This figure had increased to 5,000 in the early 1990s but it seems that counting ceased long ago. When barcodes were first brought to the UK, they were eyed with suspicion, yet that seems unthinkable today. One of the reasons why the UK was so far behind America in terms of using the technology was apparently due to the reluctance of manufacturers to print the codes onto the packaging of their products.
Updating a database
Barcodes aren’t simply useful in retail for inputting the prices of goods into a till. They are used for analytical and statistical purposes too, allowing store managers to easily see which goods are selling the most frequently. The database that the information is fed into can be used to place orders in advance ...
... of stocks running out, and this can even take place automatically if certain programming changes are made. The codes aren’t just used in retail however, and they are also used in several other areas such as the postal service and in archiving scenarios too.
Numbers of barcodes
Barcode scanners work by reading the spaces between the bars on a barcode. These bars are then used to identify the item that is scanned. The barcode will have initially been scanned manually with information such as what the product is and its cost are matched up it in the database, meaning that every time the barcode is scanned, the relevant information is produced. It is possible for an administrator to access the relevant database at any time to update records such as the items cost and how it is labelled on the database. Meanwhile, when the barcode is added to the database, the Barcode Number underneath the barcode are added to the database too, as sometime codes can become unreadable due to damaged packaging for instance; the till operator then enters the number into the till manually, instead of scanning the barcodes.