Will QR codes replace barcodes? An article in The Hustle describes one-dimensional barcodes and their two-dimensional replacements.
The first barcodes, 1974
The original barcodes first appeared in 1974 at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. A cashier scanned the barcode that appeared on a package of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum.
This was a revolutionary achievement. Before that time, if you wanted to buy something, a cashier had to read the price of the item from the price sticker, then key that price into the cash register. Although it seemd OK at the time, this process introduced the possibility of mistakes. But what if you could “read” the price of the item without having to key in anything? This would provide you with accuracy AND speed.
Enter the barcode. Of course this had unintended consequences, such as the elimination of price stickers from products. But I digress.
Barcodes weren’t just useful in grocery stores, but were also useful in other places, such as warehouses.
Where the limitations of barcodes became evident.
By 1994, each product had to have a slew of barcodes to satisfy different purposes:
- Sell the product, like the gum example above.
- Explain how to use the product. Not really important for chewing gum, but critically important for more complex products.
- Provide safety information about the product. Again more important for some products than others.
And because barcodes were limited in size, you had to put multiple barcodes on some products.
Masohiro Hara develops QR codes, 1992-1994
So what was happening in Japan by 1992?
“[O]n a factory floor in a Toyota auto-parts subsidiary in Japan, workers were drowning in barcodes.
“They were everywhere: some components on the line needed ten barcodes just to capture all the tracking data. Employees scanned them, one by one, hundreds of times a day.”
Any marketer who has to deal with non-marketers knows that solution.
Just as non-marketers demand that marketers “make the logo bigger,” the obvious solution was to “make the barcode bigger” to fit more data and reduce the number of barcodes on every product.
So Masohiro Hara did exactly that by creating a two-dimensional version of a one-dimensional barcode that we now know as Quick Response codes, or QR codes. (“Quick response” because the code can be read at high speed.)
And then…nothing happened.
GS1 adopts QR codes, 2027
Oh, sure, a lot of people began adopting QR codes, including Bredemarket.
But the monopolistic organization GS1 that controlled the assignment of barcode number prefixes did nothing.
Until it did something.
“Two years ago, though, GS1 made an announcement. The barcode was out.
“The organization was ushering in a new era, a global shift unlike any the retail industry has seen before. Much like the transformation of the ‘70s, retailers would begin to move to QR codes.”
Some retailers, especially the large ones, will move more quickly than others. And will impose requirements on their suppliers.
But what will happen when you point your smartphone camera to THIS QR code? We’ll see.