This holiday season, almost every gift you buy is going to have one thing in common: a barcode. If you do your gift shopping in a physical store, you’ll likely buy items with barcodes that are scanned when you check out. If you shop online, your packages will arrive with barcodes that are scanned multiple times before they arrive at your doorstep. Barcodes have significantly shaped retail over the last 50 years, and maybe the clearest sign of their success is that most people don’t give them a second thought. However, that wasn’t always the case. The same barcodes that will be scanned billions of times this holiday season were greeted with nationwide consumer protests when they were first introduced by the grocery industry in the 1970s.
Understanding the early consumer reaction to barcodes requires going back to the early days of the grocery industry’s development of the UPC (Universal Product Code) barcode. The industry spent considerable time meeting with various stakeholders who would be affected by barcodes, but they took one group for granted: consumers. The grocery industry assumed consumers wouldn’t care if barcodes began appearing on items, but that assumption was almost a fatal mistake. As Stephen Brown detailed in his book about the development of the UPC barcode, the grocery industry was “totally unprepared for the furor consumer groups were to raise.”
The grocery industry was unprepared for one consumer in particular: Carol Tucker-Foreman, who was the head of the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) from 1973-1977. Tucker-Foreman spearheaded a national fight against barcode adoption that began as soon as the grocery industry finalized its plan for the UPC barcode. She went on the Phil Donahue Show in 1974 to warn people about the barcode, testified in front of the US Senate, and gave countless interviews for local and national newspapers. In a few cases, Tucker-Foreman even organized public debates about barcodes where, according to one newspaper, she “verbally slugged it out” with grocery industry representatives. She was a formidable adversary who became arguably the most serious threat the barcode ever faced.
Consumer groups’ major concern about barcodes focused on the issue of individual item pricing. Before barcodes, most items in grocery stores had individual price tags so that the item prices could be manually entered by the cashier. The grocery industry wanted to replace individual item pricing with shelf pricing (kinda like clothes are today), which required significantly less labor. If you’ve been to a grocery store in the last decade, you know that shelf pricing eventually won out, but at the height of the 1970s barcode protests that outcome was in doubt. Tucker-Foreman fought hard to preserve individual item pricing and argued that replacing individual item pricing with barcodes would “totally remove the consumer privilege to shop comparatively” and lead to a loss of consumer agency.
While debates about price tags on items in grocery stores might seem rather strange today, in the mid-1970s concerns about individual item tagging gained significant public attention. Consumer groups distributed polemical pamphlets calling the barcode “A New Supermarket Ripoff,”, and newspapers published editorials with titles like “You’ll Never See Price Till You Get Your Total If Grocery Industry Changes Its Ways.” The fight to preserve item pricing even led to calls for boycotts of grocery stores that replaced item pricing with barcodes. As one consumer advocate argued, “Prices on individual products would eliminate all resistance to UPCs. It’s such a little thing; it’s really hard to understand why the food industry wouldn’t agree to it.”
The grocery industry refused to back down in the face of growing consumer pressure for one major reason: money. Barcode systems required a significant monetary investment (upwards of $200,000 per store), and a major way grocery stores could justify that investment was by reducing the paid labor required to attach price tags to each item. In other words, implementing barcodes likely wasn’t financially viable unless the barcodes replaced individual item pricing. Consequently, when consumer groups began pushing for legislation that would make removing individual item price tags illegal, it became an existential threat to the future of the barcode. Or as an executive for Giant Foods put it in his 1976 testimony to the Maryland state legislature, “Your decision with reference to mandatory price marking will therefore have an important impact on the decision of the industry whether to proceed with our plans to implement the computer-assisted checkout system.”
Consumer groups succeeded in getting a few states to pass legislation that temporarily protected individual item pricing, but no Federal legislation was ever passed that might have been the death knell for the barcode. By the late 1970s, consumer protests about barcodes had mostly died down, possibly in part because Tucker-Foreman took a job as the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in 1977 and because consumers began to adjust to the shelf pricing model. However, while the consumer protests didn’t stop barcode adoption, they did have a significant impact. By the late 1970s, far fewer grocery stores had adopted barcodes than the industry had predicted, and a 1978 report detailed how the consumer protests had made some executives lose “their enthusiasm for the [barcode] system.”
The grocery industry obviously stuck with the barcode, and in the early 1980s barcode adoption began to increase exponentially: by the end of the decade more than half of grocery stores in the US had barcode systems. The success of barcodes in the grocery industry also spurred other huge organizations — including the US Postal Service and the Department of Defense—to adopt barcodes to identify items. And the rest is history. Barcodes have now become one of the most widely adopted technologies ever invented, and even as they approach their 50th birthday in 2024, more than six billion barcodes are scanned every single day.
Ultimately, the 1970s barcode protests are a valuable reminder that no technology is inevitable. Barcodes are such an omnipresent part of our lives that they can feel like they’ve always been there, but if the barcode protests had succeeded, our holiday shopping might look very different today.
Jordan Frith is the author of Barcode in the Object Lessons series. He is Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University, USA. His other books include A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification (2019) and Smartphones as Locative Media (2015).
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