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This is all new to me! I've read a few blogs but never actually decided to create one myself. It makes me ask myself a question, "Why?"
I suppose the answer lies in my love of what i do, and believe me I never thought that my career would be in the barcoding industry. As a younger man i didn't even think about barcodes and why they exist. They are just there, a tattoo invented by the retail world to help shift tins of beans quickly. How wrong i was!
Barcodes have changed the world and new innovations like RFID continue to revolutionise industries across the globe. It's a bold statement to say "Barcodes changed the world" but let me use supermarkets as an example of how.
For as long as humans have existed so to has supply and demand. The only thing that has changed is our hunger for things. Houses, Cars, Shoes (one for the ladies) anything, our thirst for accuring "stuff" is relentless. We all need to eat and one of the largest industries in the world is retail, particularly food retail. The likes of Tesco, Sainsburys and ASDA have become more powerful as our appetites as consumers have grown. We crave convenience, everything under one roof and these giants of the retail world have thrived on our hunger.
The main problem they had was how to find a way to transact this new demand for the products and services they offer. Can you imagine the supermarket of the 70's and 80's being able to keep up with the expectations we have today. A lady, dressed in a tabard with slightly greying hair, having a casual chat as she slowly key's in each individual price, peering over her glasses to get a better view of the badly printed price tag previously applied using one of those guns that looks like a stapler. Not a chance, there would be queues of angry people tapping there feet and grumbling under there voices about how bad this country is. The answer barcodes, simple!
Well it's more complicated than you think. Granted the barcode itself is just a series of black and white stripes, clever in it's design but on it's own useless. The clever bit is the systems that take the information and process it. When your shopping whistles past the magic red beams, chirping the inevitable "Beep", systems all around the globe kick into action.
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