CINCINNATI — Every time you scan an item at the grocery store, you can thank a Cincinnati man for helping to get bar codes on almost everything we buy.
Barry Franz grew up in Linwood and graduated from Withrow High School before attending MIT. After college, he came back home to help usher in the computer age at Procter & Gamble.
"A lot of large-scale use of computers in inventory control," Franz said.
Before bar codes, inventory was done store by store, aisle by aisle, by hand.
WATCH: How Franz changed grocery stores forever
"They run around with a little gadget that had ... it fed out little tabs that stuck to every product, and that was the price," Franz said. "So every product in the store had to be price-marked."
Grocers like Kroger wanted uniformity. They wanted a way to scan and something to scan. In the late 60s, they got their wish as RCA and IBM started developing the technology.
"As a matter of fact, the first application of any scanning in the United States took place with an RCA scanner at a Kroger in Kenwood," Franz said.
Now all that was needed was the thing to scan. It had been tried before, but Franz and seven other bright minds became the Ad-Hoc Committee, a group that cracked the code in two and a half years.
"We ended up coming up with a number identification for the products ... five digits for manufacturing number, five digits for identification of the product," Franz said.
That's how 51 years ago, the Universal Product Code — or bar code — was born.
"They began to understand how products moved," Franz said. "And one of the first things they found out was in the wine department of Kroger, there were some wines, some variations of wines at Kroger that didn't move at all, so it helped to reduce that part of the inventory."
The innovation cut down costs and sped up the checkout line forever.
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