These days, barcode labels are all around us, on everything we own, except for fresh groceries, which if purchased from special high end grocery supermarkets as packed units also come with their own label.

Originally, these UPCs (Universal Product Code labels) were intended for use in grocery markets to make checkout a faster and efficient process but because of the magnitude of their success, other industries also adopted these labels to save their time and make indexing and tracking easy.

Understanding the barcode-

A series of lines of varying weights and distances between each other has come to be seen as a way to identify barcodes. While this is true superficially, there is much more to the lines. Most barcode labels these days come with a machine readable part, viz., the lines, as well as a human readable twelve digit number indicative of information about the product they are stuck on.

While the first six digits of the human readable code identify the manufacturer, the next five denote the product number. Each product has a unique number associated with it, which along with pricing details are fed into a computer handling all the information about billing, making available to the staff, the entire data about the product sold, simply at the click of a button.

The last digit of the bar code is perhaps the most interesting. It is called the check digit and is used to check if the whole code as read by the scanner is correct or not. Every time a scanner reads the code, it performs certain simple calculations, the result of which should be the same as the check digit. If not, the scanner goes into a loop and sounds an alarm, indicating that the code wasn’t scanned correctly and the operator runs a scan again.

This in a nutshell was a brief on how barcode labels work towards creating a unique identity for each product in line.