8 a.m. on June 26, 1974. A cheerful beep rang out from the checkout counter at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It came after a store employee scanned with a machine the sticker with "black stripes" attached to a pack of 10 sticks of gum. When the gum price was entered accurately at the register, applause and cheers broke out among the store officials who had been watching in silence. This was the moment the barcode, now printed more than 5 billion times a day, made its debut.
The barcode instantly solved the biggest headache for store owners in the 1970s. Before the barcode was invented, employees had to add up, one by one, the price tags on the items customers brought to the counter. Checkout took too long and errors were frequent. Employees also reportedly suffered from hay fever. In the early 1970s, IBM engineer George Laurer created the vertical stripe barcode used today, based on an earlier, initial form of barcode.
As barcodes became an international standard, the global distribution industry gained a common language. For example, the Universal Product Code (UPC), an international standard invented in the United States, consists of 12 digits. Each number carries information about the product and the manufacturer. In effect, a barcode functions like a resident registration number for goods. Thanks to such barcodes, it became easier to export products made in Korea worldwide. In addition, distributors were able to manage inventory more easily, leading to improved revenue.
In the 1990s, when the world economy grew explosively, criticism arose that even barcodes were insufficient to hold product information. In response, Denso Wave, a Japanese auto parts company, announced the QR (Quick Response) code in 1994, a two-dimensional barcode that added horizontal lines to the barcode. A QR code can contain up to more than 7,000 numerals or more than 4,200 letters. As QR codes also became an international standard, scanning them via smartphones and tablets allows the same content to be accessed anywhere.
Because QR codes can store more information than barcodes, they are used much more widely. For example, in 2020, when COVID-19 was spreading rapidly, the Korean government issued QR codes to citizens to certify their vaccination status. Today, recognizing a QR code next to an artwork in museums and galleries lets visitors access detailed information about the work in audio or text. Food manufacturers include detailed information in QR codes about what ingredients are in a product and how its nutrients are composed. At restaurants, everything from ordering to payment can be done via QR code.