Every morning, Marie Dupin slips into the skin of a personality, an event, a place or a fact at the heart of the news.
The barcode was born on April 3, 1973 in the United States. A year later, he was scanned for the very first time in a supermarket in Ohio, on a packet of chewing gum. And from the start, it had very concrete consequences. Thanks to its 24 bars, which are the transcription of its 13 digits, no more labels stuck by hand on each product, shops closed for inventory and prices entered by hand.
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The barcode is becoming the necessary support for the development of mass commerce, with its millions of references that can change prices from one moment to another, to do better than the competitor or trigger a promotion. The distributors know in real time the state of their sales and their stocks. It’s simple, the barcode has become the universal language of mass distribution, now triggering ten billion beeps on the planet every day.
The QR code, a more transparent replacement?
And yet, the barcode will soon disappear. By 2027, at only 54, he will be dethroned by the QR Code (for “Quick Response Code”), the quick response code. It was the GS1 organization that announced it. GS1 is a global product identification organization, a sort of barcode UN that brings together two million companies in 150 countries and has decided that barcoding is out of fashion. But the latter is a good player, because it must be admitted, the one who will have the skin of his bars, the QR Code, has undeniable assets that he does not have.
Every morning at 7:26 a.m. @mdups slips “In the skin of the info”
This morning, Marie Dupin is a barcode, born 50 years ago to the day and has become the universal language of mass distribution. But by 2027, the QR code will replace it! pic.twitter.com/Bk88vfUEqZ
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) April 3, 2023
Thanks to him, it will be possible to know the origin of the products, to know how they were made. To know, for example, the name of the breeder for a meat, to also know the batch number of a product and therefore to block it automatically at the checkout in the event of a recall. What is not possible with the barcode. This will make it possible to avoid ending up with dangerous products on the shelves, as we saw in the Buitoni affair or that of contaminated milk.
In short, the disappearance of the barcode will be the occasion of a major transition. Still it will be necessary that the industrialists agree to play the game of transparency or that one forces them there.