From The London Times
The barcode is nothing to celebrate
It killed off the traditional shop and gave us the checkout girl. And what’s with a 57th anniversary anyway?
Giles Coren
I think we are all well aware that Wednesday was the 57th anniversary of the invention of the barcode. It’s bizarre that we are, because it was hardly the most interesting thing about last Wednesday, which was also, as you probably know, the 438th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, Heinrich Himmler’s 109th birthday and the 97th anniversary (to the very day!) of the first transaction made on the Helsinki stock exchange. But it is the glorious 57th of the barcode that we know about.
And we know about it, of course, because Google decided to commemorate it in its “doodle” du jour. And that is how we come collectively to know things about our days now. Once, it was the church calendar that told us: everyone knew intuitively that it was Whitsuntide, Ash Wednesday or Michaelmas. Then it was newspapers, and we all knew what the headlines were. And then it was television, and we all knew that tonight we’d find out who shot JR. But now it’s whatever the hell some Korean kid in Silicon Valley feels like commemorating in a search engine logo doodle.
And so eight billion people, more or less, got up on Wednesday, logged on, saw a barcode where the multicoloured “Google” normally is, and thought: “Eh? What’s that? Oh, right, it must be the anniversary of the barcode. And that’s probably ‘Google’ written as a barcode.”
And how right we all were. And then I bet we all thought to ourselves: “I wonder when it was invented? 1970-ish? Maybe mid-1960s at a push?”; And were astounded when we clicked on the image for more information and found that it was invented, in fact, way back in 1952.
“1952?” we all probably screamed. “George VI was still alive! People in England barely had televisions, let alone barcode scanners! The very notion of the ‘shop’ was still pretty much in its infancy. Most people in England were still driving their geese to market on Saturday mornings, hoping to exchange some of the feathers for a turnip and a quill. And in America they already had barcodes!”
No doubt you, like me, have thought since last Wednesday of practically nothing but barcodes (unless you are Vladimir Putin, who was also 57 on Wednesday and was probably too excited about all the cake and presents to notice). First of all I thought: “What’s so big about the 57th anniversary? Has Google, with all its binary programming and innovative teccy numerical stuff, simply done away with base 10 and its hidebound gold, silver and diamond anniversarial demarcations, and now the big one is really the 57th, or beryllium, anniversary?”
And then, like me, I am certain that you gave a moment’s thought to the two chaps who (we learn) invented it, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. Such wonderfully evocative American names, so perfectly representative of opposite sides of the Dream. It’s so immediately obvious that good old Norman Woodland (“Norm!”) was the one who came up with the idea for writing words as a sequence of lines, but that he had no head for business and only thought that it might make a useful labelling system for Auntie May’s apple pie stall at the barn-raising.
And it was only when clever little Bernie Silver shuffled in on the act that they developed a plan to make money out of it.
It seems a rum thing to celebrate, though. Because what, after all, have we gained by the invention of the barcode (which, in the end, was first employed in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974)?
As far as I can tell, the main thing that the barcode has achieved is to have brought an end to the old-fashioned scenario in one’s local shop, where the little man in the white overalls smiles as he takes down the flour tin from the shelf to weigh out your half-pound, and says: “Baking today, is it, Mrs Foskett? Not your famous fairy cakes? Hope there’s one left over for me!”
Good work, barcode. You’ve certainly seen off that nosey old bastard.
Yup, the barcode killed the shop. Nice one. Like all modernising inventions, it came along with a brief to speed things up and, where possible, eradicate people. A bit like the industrialised Nazi death camps (happy birthday, Heinrich!). And while that may be great as a model for business or genocide, it rather runs counter to the instinctive will of humanity.
I tell a lie. The barcode did give us something useful. It gave us the phrase “supermarket checkout girl” as a convenient shorthand for a girl of low status and minimal intellect — the sort of girl you don’t want to end up settling for, or, if you are a girl, end up being. Whichever it is, she’s waiting for you if you don’t get on with your homework.
Swipe, swipe, blip. Swipe, swipe, blip. It’s the sound of the end of the world. The final, total automation of the need to eat. The digitisation of the life instinct. Indeed, there are now supermarkets with no checkout staff at all, where you just swipe, swipe, blip the barcodes yourself and go home without speaking a word. Such places are generally full of lonely singletons buying frozen lasagne and soft porn, rapists and teenage muggers helping themselves to the booze. Good on you, Norman Joe! Hats off, Bernie!
And even if you are on the side of corporate rapine, and celebrate the bypassing of the human in all commercial transactions, wouldn’t you have been more excited about October 7 if barcodes actually worked? If it wasn’t always a case of some illiterate till popsy being unable to find the barcode on the egg box and turning it over and over and then banging it huffily down on the counter so that the omelette that you were going to have for lunch starts making itself right there in the shop, and then spending the next ten minutes trying to type in the numbers manually — tutting and sighing all the time — until she eventually hits “enter” and the display screen charges up a gross of Brussels sprout trees at £456?
It’s why I have never signed up for the airport retinal identification scheme, tempting thought it is. There’s always some smug bugger from your plane who doesn’t join the back of the immigration queue but strides airily past to the scanner, presses his eye up to the lens like Captain Kirk, and swans through to pick up his matching luggage and Louis Vuitton ski bag while you’re still rummaging through your duty free bags for a passport.
But I just know that if I ever got around to signing up to this human barcode system I’d end up flying into Heathrow in the middle of the night, sauntering up to the machine, pressing my eye to the scanner and being told that I can’t come into the country because I am four tins of skipjack tuna in brine, and did I know that if I take one more tin I get a free jar of Hellman’s?
? And if you thought computers didn’t have a sense of humour, today’s Nice Try of the Week award goes to Berry Bros and Rudd, vendors of pukka plonk to posh people since AD634. Ordering a case of Crozes Hermitage on their website yesterday, I was informed that it came to £199.80.
And then came the following helpful little suggestion: “Free delivery on all orders over £200.00. Spend an extra £0.20 to qualify for free delivery. Why not add 1982 Ch. Latour, Pauillac: £1,950.00?”
The barcode is nothing to celebrate
It killed off the traditional shop and gave us the checkout girl. And what’s with a 57th anniversary anyway?
Giles Coren
I think we are all well aware that Wednesday was the 57th anniversary of the invention of the barcode. It’s bizarre that we are, because it was hardly the most interesting thing about last Wednesday, which was also, as you probably know, the 438th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, Heinrich Himmler’s 109th birthday and the 97th anniversary (to the very day!) of the first transaction made on the Helsinki stock exchange. But it is the glorious 57th of the barcode that we know about.
And we know about it, of course, because Google decided to commemorate it in its “doodle” du jour. And that is how we come collectively to know things about our days now. Once, it was the church calendar that told us: everyone knew intuitively that it was Whitsuntide, Ash Wednesday or Michaelmas. Then it was newspapers, and we all knew what the headlines were. And then it was television, and we all knew that tonight we’d find out who shot JR. But now it’s whatever the hell some Korean kid in Silicon Valley feels like commemorating in a search engine logo doodle.
And so eight billion people, more or less, got up on Wednesday, logged on, saw a barcode where the multicoloured “Google” normally is, and thought: “Eh? What’s that? Oh, right, it must be the anniversary of the barcode. And that’s probably ‘Google’ written as a barcode.”
And how right we all were. And then I bet we all thought to ourselves: “I wonder when it was invented? 1970-ish? Maybe mid-1960s at a push?”; And were astounded when we clicked on the image for more information and found that it was invented, in fact, way back in 1952.
“1952?” we all probably screamed. “George VI was still alive! People in England barely had televisions, let alone barcode scanners! The very notion of the ‘shop’ was still pretty much in its infancy. Most people in England were still driving their geese to market on Saturday mornings, hoping to exchange some of the feathers for a turnip and a quill. And in America they already had barcodes!”
No doubt you, like me, have thought since last Wednesday of practically nothing but barcodes (unless you are Vladimir Putin, who was also 57 on Wednesday and was probably too excited about all the cake and presents to notice). First of all I thought: “What’s so big about the 57th anniversary? Has Google, with all its binary programming and innovative teccy numerical stuff, simply done away with base 10 and its hidebound gold, silver and diamond anniversarial demarcations, and now the big one is really the 57th, or beryllium, anniversary?”
And then, like me, I am certain that you gave a moment’s thought to the two chaps who (we learn) invented it, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. Such wonderfully evocative American names, so perfectly representative of opposite sides of the Dream. It’s so immediately obvious that good old Norman Woodland (“Norm!”) was the one who came up with the idea for writing words as a sequence of lines, but that he had no head for business and only thought that it might make a useful labelling system for Auntie May’s apple pie stall at the barn-raising.
And it was only when clever little Bernie Silver shuffled in on the act that they developed a plan to make money out of it.
It seems a rum thing to celebrate, though. Because what, after all, have we gained by the invention of the barcode (which, in the end, was first employed in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974)?
As far as I can tell, the main thing that the barcode has achieved is to have brought an end to the old-fashioned scenario in one’s local shop, where the little man in the white overalls smiles as he takes down the flour tin from the shelf to weigh out your half-pound, and says: “Baking today, is it, Mrs Foskett? Not your famous fairy cakes? Hope there’s one left over for me!”
Good work, barcode. You’ve certainly seen off that nosey old bastard.
Yup, the barcode killed the shop. Nice one. Like all modernising inventions, it came along with a brief to speed things up and, where possible, eradicate people. A bit like the industrialised Nazi death camps (happy birthday, Heinrich!). And while that may be great as a model for business or genocide, it rather runs counter to the instinctive will of humanity.
I tell a lie. The barcode did give us something useful. It gave us the phrase “supermarket checkout girl” as a convenient shorthand for a girl of low status and minimal intellect — the sort of girl you don’t want to end up settling for, or, if you are a girl, end up being. Whichever it is, she’s waiting for you if you don’t get on with your homework.
Swipe, swipe, blip. Swipe, swipe, blip. It’s the sound of the end of the world. The final, total automation of the need to eat. The digitisation of the life instinct. Indeed, there are now supermarkets with no checkout staff at all, where you just swipe, swipe, blip the barcodes yourself and go home without speaking a word. Such places are generally full of lonely singletons buying frozen lasagne and soft porn, rapists and teenage muggers helping themselves to the booze. Good on you, Norman Joe! Hats off, Bernie!
And even if you are on the side of corporate rapine, and celebrate the bypassing of the human in all commercial transactions, wouldn’t you have been more excited about October 7 if barcodes actually worked? If it wasn’t always a case of some illiterate till popsy being unable to find the barcode on the egg box and turning it over and over and then banging it huffily down on the counter so that the omelette that you were going to have for lunch starts making itself right there in the shop, and then spending the next ten minutes trying to type in the numbers manually — tutting and sighing all the time — until she eventually hits “enter” and the display screen charges up a gross of Brussels sprout trees at £456?
It’s why I have never signed up for the airport retinal identification scheme, tempting thought it is. There’s always some smug bugger from your plane who doesn’t join the back of the immigration queue but strides airily past to the scanner, presses his eye up to the lens like Captain Kirk, and swans through to pick up his matching luggage and Louis Vuitton ski bag while you’re still rummaging through your duty free bags for a passport.
But I just know that if I ever got around to signing up to this human barcode system I’d end up flying into Heathrow in the middle of the night, sauntering up to the machine, pressing my eye to the scanner and being told that I can’t come into the country because I am four tins of skipjack tuna in brine, and did I know that if I take one more tin I get a free jar of Hellman’s?
? And if you thought computers didn’t have a sense of humour, today’s Nice Try of the Week award goes to Berry Bros and Rudd, vendors of pukka plonk to posh people since AD634. Ordering a case of Crozes Hermitage on their website yesterday, I was informed that it came to £199.80.
And then came the following helpful little suggestion: “Free delivery on all orders over £200.00. Spend an extra £0.20 to qualify for free delivery. Why not add 1982 Ch. Latour, Pauillac: £1,950.00?”
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