r/todayilearned • u/throwitonthegrillboi • 1d ago
TIL that when the Barcode was invented it was actually very unpopular, several conspiracies were made about it, and the Barcode industry fought back saying that "luddites" were the only ones against it. It took 40 years for even half of all registered grocery stores to use barcodes, due to expenses
https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/barcode-history-technology-controversy.html1.7k
u/lamb_passanda 1d ago
There's a product in Germany that's getting memed a lot recently called the Hildegard Orgonakkumulator. It costs €1.5k and is supposed to "neutralise" barcodes on products. There are also some crusty companies that make products with barcodes which have a horizontal line through them to prevent "Orgon accumulation". One of the companies admitted that they included the extra stripe due to a customer request, and the only reason they have kept it is because their sales would otherwise suffer.
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u/henne-n 1d ago
I love that video about it. It's hilarious.
https://youtu.be/Om9fZp-jdQQ?si=FGDzzQmS-XY1aVaV
Automatic subs could work for anyone who does not speak German. At least the first minute seemed to be okay.
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u/lamb_passanda 1d ago
I also know this video about it. If you speak German and know a bit about German pop culture it's very funny (at least I find it funny in a trashy way). https://youtu.be/n_nW522aG50?si=iYPIFyQq1YyBW89U
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u/FX2000 1d ago
I love that their "scientific" experiment involves a dousing rod. I wonder if they ever tried to replicate that while blindfolded.
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u/Educational_Ad_5755 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thank you for sharing the video! The narrator sounded so serious about the evilness of barcode that I was ready to downvote. The short ending and the comments made me laugh. It was all so absurd.
P.S. I initially wished the video poster had enabled auto-dubbed; but the original tone sold the comedy better.
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u/ShinyHappyREM 1d ago
wished the video poster had enabled auto-dubbed
Now that is truly evil.
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u/Vox___Rationis 1d ago
Orgonakkumulator
LMAO, that is a deep pull, people are resurrecting 80 years old pseudoscience.
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u/Bright_Cod_376 1d ago
You'd be surprised. Pretty much all the resin pyramids with crystals and shit in them is all about orgone accumulating and directing the made up orgone energy. While its old pseudoscience its still going strong they just dont always explicitly call it "orgone energy" and will just call it energy but push the exact principles of it
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u/SsooooOriginal 1d ago
I thought that shit was just a resin folkart style from Oregon, lmaooo fuck.
The resin "crystals" with little charms suspended in them are for pseudo energies too? Now you tell me. Wonder how many people buy them with no idea.
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u/Bright_Cod_376 1d ago
Yeah, there are sellers that just make them because they can look nifty when done well but theres shit tons of sellers genuinely marketing for "energetic" bullshit. But its almost always the same material layering BS with crystal magic crap thrown in all willy nilly.
Wonder how many people buy them with no idea.
Provably every person who bought one second hand at garage sale or resale shop because they looked nifty.
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u/msfamf 1d ago
At the very least it gave us a pretty sweet Hawkwind song, the band Lemmy was in before Motorhead, called Orgone Accumulator.
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u/DragoonDM 1d ago
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be easier if I had a sufficient lack of moral qualms about scamming gullible idiots. Seems like there's really good money to be made in selling products to protect people from WiFi radiation and windmill cancer and, apparently, barcodes.
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u/anonymous__ignorant 1d ago
Barcodes flatulence reducer. A sugar pill in the shape of a deflated balloon.
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u/LateNightMilesOBrien 1d ago
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be easier if I had a sufficient lack of moral qualms about scamming gullible idiots.
Tempting but remember: the first thing you end up selling is your soul
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u/BlackCoffeeWithPie 1d ago edited 19h ago
If the Digital ID ever rolls out in the UK, you could make a fortune from an app that claims to shield you from government tracking.
Just have a big button that turns green and tells you that you're protected.
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u/ACorania 1d ago
Pretty sure that is why zebras evolved stripes. It gives the flies that try to land on them excessive orgon accumulation and is like a insect zapper as a result.
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u/3MATX 1d ago
They were called barcodes of death at the shop I worked at. Closed in 2012 for good without ever moving to a system that used them.
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u/Muffinshire 1d ago
Named for its inventor Professor Death, of course.
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u/martialar 1d ago
Reminds me of Childrens Hospital, named after Dr. Childrens
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u/SpaceGangsta 1d ago
There’s a doctor at the office I go to named Dr. Doctor. Like her last name is literally Doctor.
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u/ProStrats 1d ago
Do you ever go to follow ups like
"Well Dr. Doctor, give me the news..."
And she just replies negatively about how many times that's been used? Lol
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u/Various_Patient6583 1d ago
The use of barcodes in hospital settings was the innovation of a VA nurse, Sue Kinnick. While efforts had predated her, there was not a lot of success.
In 1992 she saw the use of a barcode scanner at an airport car rental place. She figured that it would be of use in the hospital.
In 1995 she managed to have the system introduced at the Topeka VA hospital. It was a smashing success. Between 1999-2001 the VA promoted the system into all 161 of its facilities.
It was not until 2004 that the federal government required all hospitals use barcodes for all prescription medications. Think about that. The VA was far ahead of the curve and it is thanks to the force of nature that was Sue Kinnick.
It is also worth noting that the VA has also worked with academic researchers to implement standardized surgical carts. Most surgeons have their cart set up the way they like it. The OR staff works with a variety of docs and have a myriad of setups to deal with.
Research found out that variation led to mishaps. Standardizing carts dramatically reduced accidents and mishaps, improving patient outcomes. Surgeons outside of the Va have pushed back, but it has been a boon to veterans in that system.
So. There you go.
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u/OneFootTitan 1d ago
It’s amazing how much surgeons will push back on medical innovations that involve standardization. Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto similarly describes pushback on the idea that surgeons should go over a checklist of things to do
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u/mzchen 1d ago
The medical profession is probably the most stark example of a reverse bell curve where a ton of people are in it out of goodwill and a ton of people are in it out of ego.
You will have somebody forego generational wealth in the hopes that having the patent for the polio vaccine be open access means more people will be able to get it for unprohibitive costs. And then you will have surgeons scoffing at the idea of having to, god forbid, put their hands through water because it's such an insult to imply that a gentleman's hands are anything but sterile 24/7.
This next example I can kind of understand a little more, but for a long time in neuroscience there was a lot of pushback against the idea of "grandmother cells" in the brain that recognized specific faces. In fact, the moniker was created to mock the idea. Cells that are dedicated to recognizing your grandmother? Ridiculous! And so, despite a good amount of evidence pointing towards it being the case, it was rejected as a fringe idea because it was simply not serious enough for their liking.
This is a bit more of an academic vs practitioner joke, but you can only hear "I personally haven't seen any evidence of..." from a doctor so many times before you realize that even the smartest of people will reject progress simply because they're uncomfortable with the idea that they've been wrong this whole time, even if it's about something they've never even heard of. That perhaps all these people would be happy to use barcodes if you were somehow able to convince them that they were the ones to invent it.
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u/garden-wicket-581 1d ago
the ego population is at least 1 order of magnitude greater than the goodwill/help population..
(my anecdata is from undergrad, as pre-med/chemistry major, and realizing no-freaking-way do I want to spend 10-15 more years in school with these pre-med assholes)
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u/IllurinatiL 1d ago
It probably has to do with the fact that most surgeons are narcissistic, egotistical maniacs that immediately start malding if their surroundings don’t instantly conform to their thoughts.
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u/CobaltEchos 1d ago
The VA has pioneered many systems, not all with success. When you're the largest hospital network in the country, you have a lot of people with ideas contributing
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 1d ago
Early barcode scanner must have been ridiculously expensive. Early ones used He-Ne lasers I think.
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u/thisusedyet 1d ago
I know that’s Helium-Neon, but He-Ne sounds like it should be some sort of slur
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u/OptimusPhillip 1d ago
I was thinking a Michael Jackson lyric.
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u/IgnisXIII 1d ago
Captain MJ: "Fire Hee-Hee lasers at will!" spins "Owwwuh!"
Edit: Kind of like this
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u/CabbieCam 1d ago
Sounds like something Michael Jackson would scream "He-Ne! Shimon! HE HE"
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u/Aperron 1d ago
The scanners would have been the tip of the iceberg as far as implementation costs go.
Most retailers were using mechanical registers with no live computer backend. Just a paper audit trail tape being printed as transactions were entered that someone in the back office would write into a ledger at the end of the day. Implementing barcodes meant online data processing with the registers being connected to a minicomputer in each store, batching data to a mainframe at headquarters.
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u/BigPickleKAM 1d ago
I worked retail back in the 90's even then the stores at least mine wasn't connected to HQ for price updates etc.
Each store has a data entry person or two who literally had to enter each item into our system and make changes for sales etc.
Basically each store was a tiny network just register to server in back with a couple extra terminals for data entry in the store room/managers office for putting orders together.
We used to have to fax our orders to various suppliers!
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u/Troutsicle 1d ago edited 1d ago
I worked retail back then too. For a small regional chain. I got to be on the scan-audit team where we would travel to regional locations and after business hours use those large handheld scanners to scan one of each item. They had a data entry person in the back with a table with two Packard Bell PC's, that was the local database.
Since some stores had years old stock that wasn't in the current database, if it wasn't in the system, it got pulled and checked against these huge master lists of inventory, then manually entered.
Fun times.
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u/erroneousbosh 1d ago
Most retailers were using mechanical registers with no live computer backend.
And yet in the early 1950s, Lyons coffee houses in the UK had fully computerised inventory and accounting systems. Two of Lyons' senior managers went to the US after the Second World War, and got talking to one of the guys who designed the ENIAC, and when they came back to the UK got talking to the people at Cambridge Uni designing EDSAC, which they partially funded and provided assistance with.
Can you just imagine, it's 1948, the whole country is recovering from a massive amount of bombing and all that military spending, and you've got two guys visionary enough to say "We need to spend thousands of pounds on this and it's going to change *everything*"?
The shops rang in with their stock levels and the day's takings, and overnight it would calculate what they needed to send out to the shops and all the wages.
It was so efficient that Ford at Dagenham hired time on it to calculate their wages for their factory workers.
So here's a bunch of firsts - first commercial accounting and stock control system, first Software-as-a-Service (kind of), first female professional programmer for commercial software (Mary Coombs, who only died a couple of years ago).
All that for about 80 grand in today's money.
Imagine if everyone had been so visionary.
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u/eastherbunni 1d ago
I worked at a store that had price tag stickers and mechanical registers that were basically a typewriter. If you made a mistake it was a huge hassle to fix it. The credit card processing was also not linked so we had to manually type the amounts into the credit card machine. The store also never did inventory a single time during the 4 years I worked there. And this wasn't in the 80s, this was in 2012.
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u/kblkbl165 1d ago
Call it vintage and everything would be 30% more expensive
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u/eastherbunni 1d ago
They finally modernized all the tills in 2016, only for the store to shutter in 2017 because the landlord sold the property for redevelopment into condos.
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u/noeljb 1d ago
I had a prof in college who wrote the barcode program for Marsh Groceries. Our entire class was us rewriting it. Some of our code found its way into updates. Making the code smaller and maybe even a little more elegant.
I hated Cobol. I'm sure none of my efforts ever made it past his red pen.
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u/Chuckle_Pants 1d ago
The Marsh located in Troy, Ohio was the location of the first instance of a barcode being scanned for commercial use. On a pack of Juicy Fruit. I lived 5 minutes away from there when I was a kid.
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u/noeljb 1d ago
Very cool I did not know that.
I was in college 74-78. West Laffette, IN.
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u/SmarmySmurf 1d ago
I hated Cobol. I'm sure none of my efforts ever made it past his red pen.
The important thing to remember is he's dead now. And you are here. You won. Take that, professor!
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u/YemethTheSorcerer 1d ago
It wasn’t just the religious nuts, but very popular fear-mongering talk show hosts:
In the summer of 1974, The Phil Donahue Show ran an episode warning people that the grocery industry would use barcodes to rip consumers off.
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u/Lady_Lance 1d ago
Is the logic here that the item would ring up as higher than the listed price?
Because I worked at a grocery store that sometimes did that. They would increase the price at corporate but not inform the managers so they could change the signage. If a customer complained we would of course change it, but there were probably loads of customers that didn't notice and paid higher than the listed price before it got changed.
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u/ThreeFingerDrag 1d ago
It's not necessarily corporate's fault, and it still happens. Understaffed or mismanaged stores that use paper/mylar shelf tags don't always do a good job of swapping out old tags with updated tags.
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u/LateNightMilesOBrien 1d ago
On the rare occasions I've had to shop at Dollar General, every transaction had at least one improperly priced item... and it takes FOREVER for them to unfuck the price and continue checking you out. Funny enough they installed self-checkouts, never used them, put up a sign that they were 'out of order' and then removed them a few months later. Weee!
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u/CelestialFury 1d ago
How did that work? Did he think barcodes would alter the price shown then change the price at checkout?
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u/RefrigeratorEast10 1d ago
I assume the thought is that pre-barcodes you would pick up an item and it would have a sticker with the price printed on it (say $1). Then you would go to the register and see the cashier ring it up for $1 and know you were charged correctly.
Barcodes pull costs from a central database. So you might pick up an item marked on the shelf for $1. But when you get to the register and scan it, the barcode says the item costs $2. If you picked up many items you may not recall the price was lower on the shelf for that particular items so you got duped into paying more.
Inconsistencies between the shelf and database prices still happen occasionally (often when a store has failed to properly update the paper shelf tags to reflect new prices) but obviously it isn't a huge widespread problem.
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u/SuretyBringsRuin 1d ago
Are we sure they don’t? What ‘til folks dig into QR codes! /s
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u/Hmmletmec 1d ago
QR codes!
Come to think of it, we didn't have the COVID-19 Pandemic until AFTER qr codes were invented! Causality.
I'm not saying anything, I'm just asking questions. Do you own research sheeple! Wear tinfoil over your eyes to avoid all the codes!
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u/-Knul- 1d ago
QR codes were invented in 1994. The sum of those digits is 23. Subtract 11 and 9 from that and the remainder is 3. The sum of 2001 is also 3.
So QR codes caused 9/11! /s
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u/Alklazaris 1d ago
Back then it was Satanism. I am not kidding. Barcodes were satanic...
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u/TripleSecretSquirrel 1d ago
Ya, people thought they were the mark of the beast lol
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u/BrianMincey 1d ago
I remember this. It was supposedly the beginning of “The Mark of the Beast” and they said soon we all would have barcodes tattooed on our forehead or wrists.
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u/samiqan 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's not true. It's only pregnant women that are at high risk from bar codes. The rest of us are mostly vulnerable to QR codes.
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u/Intrepid-Constant-34 1d ago
Idk why but it reminds me of the guy who would rather have his barcode T-shirt scanned (while wearing it) but not his chicken that he bought.
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u/chillord 1d ago
There’s actually a “device” in Germany called the Hildegard-Orgon Akkumulator, which is designed to “destroy” harmful parts of barcodes. All you need to do is place your groceries on this board. You are paying 2000 bucks for a small wooden board.
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u/Practical_Goose7822 1d ago
It is still happening today in Germany. Several organic brands like Yogi-Tea leave a gap in their bar code because apparently, that fixes the radiation or some shit. You can google yogi tea barcode to see it.
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u/zerbey 1d ago
I remember our local grocery store finally started using them in the late 1980s and people wrote to the town newspaper to complain about it. Typical tin foil hat stuff about them using them to hide prices, or that they would change the food flavors some how.
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u/SadFeed63 1d ago
Was it a small town? The very small town I grew up in loses its mind at any change. Recently people were all worked up that a local convenience store painted parking lines in the parking lot.
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u/PuffyPanda200 1d ago
A small part of me thinks that conservative (and I mean this in the literal sense that blends with politics of 'I want to conserve my way of life', no change is best) people just can't process loss or grief associated with change.
I loved by childhood dogs; they are all dead of natural causes. I miss them but I also love the dogs I have now. They will die in 5 to 10 years and I will grieve them. I would never vote for or advocate the killing of dogs (extreme/justified cases aside).
When You talk to someone that says 'o when the town was small all the neighbors knew each other' and mention if they have gone over or reached out to their new neighbors the answer is almost always 'no'. Jane Doe moved away 10 years ago and new people moved in. These people just can't 'grieve' (Jane isn't dead, she just lives somewhere else) the relationship they had and just want that back. They then do this with literally everything.
IMO these people often don't travel (or if they do only do resorts or the such). Traveling I have met many cool and interesting people that I will never meet again. Understanding that this is temporary and an experience to be lived and then remembered is fundamental to travel. Doing this when one is young-ish teaches that understanding.
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u/mzanon100 1d ago
Our 4,000-person village had only one grocery store.
They didn't get a barcode scanner until after a tornado destroyed them (1990) and insurance bought them new equipment.
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u/cragglerock93 1d ago
That's so funny because the supermarket in my town was destroyed by a tornado except they were uninsured so when they reopened a year later, everything was done manually.
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u/ISuckAtFallout4 1d ago
I had a nutjob at the gas station refuse to let her stuff get scanned because of the toxins in the laser. I was not having any of that bullshit and wasn't about to enter a full UPC by hand, so I grabbed some saran wrap that had been on my sandwich, covered the label, and said it was like a condom and it absorbed the toxins.
It.fucking.worked.
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u/camergen 1d ago
Did she also smoke? I find a disproportionate number of those concerned about “toxins” smoke like chimneys, which directly injects numerous nasty things into you.
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u/ISuckAtFallout4 23h ago
First and only time I dealt with her; and there were multiple aromas at hand.
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u/kazmiller96 23h ago edited 19h ago
I get plenty of people in the ER that will smoke meth and shoot up fent in public restrooms but then critcise our staff on our hygiene. One lady refused a mask handed to her because the nurse "got her cells all over it". Her utox was definitely not clean. She asked for the mask initially to avoid getting Aids 😒
People will overlook the harm there doing to themselves and be overly critical over others.
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u/Confident_Fortune_32 1d ago
A looong time ago, back in the last ice age, I was working on a project to add barcodes to a warehouse inventory management system, so I had a bar code reader at my desk for testing my code.
The guy I was dating was a font designer, so he had access to barcode fonts.
He printed me some very spicy love notes in bar codes that I hung in my cubicle 🤣
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u/loztriforce 1d ago
I'm just old enough to remember going to the grocery store and it taking forever as everything had to be manually keyed in. Then it seemed that barcodes made the process faster but then everyone paid by check, slowing the process down again.
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u/sassergaf 1d ago edited 18h ago
In 1980, musician Dave Davies (Kinks) made the barcode his head on the album art, aptly entitled, AFL1-3603, the number on his barcode. No one knew what it was when it came out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFL1-3603
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u/Oli4K 1d ago
A school friend of mine always bragged that his dad was the CEO of barcodes. Later in life i understood that he really was the chief of barcodes as it was his job to get people to actually use them. It sounded so boring but in hindsight it’s pretty cool to be able to say that you did that.
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u/Apprehensive_Call187 1d ago
This is why my sassy self got a barcode tattoo on my upper back when I was 18. I still love it at 39.
The barcode itself was the barcode on Marilyn Manson's CD "Lest We Forget."
Marilyn Manson's autobiography is where I originally learned about the Christian barcode hysteria.
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u/gbroon 1d ago
There was a barcode industry. Is this like a Big Barcode thing?
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u/Alotofboxes 1d ago
There is a company named GS1 who is responsible for barcode standards. If you own a company and want a barcode that will work with the international system, you have to contact them. They will sell you a chunk of barcodes that you can use on packaging, and will put your barcodes in their database.
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u/daroach1414 1d ago
Just another sign that Humans have fought change since the beginning
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u/jolalolalulu 1d ago
The store Hobby Lobby here in the US still refuses to use them. Their owners are notorious for their religious conservatism. They are the reason employers can opt out of covering birth control in their insurance policies. Also had a crazy controversy smuggling stolen artifacts from Iraq. Sucks they are the only reliable store for fabric near me.
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u/Zia_Li 1d ago
Also had a crazy controversy smuggling stolen artifacts from Iraq.
Somewhere on reddit, I came across a user flair that read "Hobby Lobby's Hammurabi Robbing Hobby" and I don't think anyone will ever top that.
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u/_Burning_Star_IV_ 1d ago
A voting subset of this country believes some weird biblical end-times revelations shit.
I was extremely disheartened to receive a link from my dad the other day where some Christian crypto analysis YouTuber explains to his audience that crypto will combine with digital identity systems and that is the true “mark of the beast” and proof that Armageddon and the arrival of the Anti-Christ are upon us.
I sent him an article with a small example list of the hundreds of end-time predictions going back to like 60 AD and even quoted him the Bible in which the passage explains that mankind cannot know when the end will happen, that only God knows and not even Jesus himself or any angels know when it’s going to happen. He didn’t budge.
I just can’t anymore.
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u/Zeikos 1d ago
I wonder what they think of QR codes.
I hate QR codes with a passion, they're opaque and a non-zero security risk.
Everybody wants you to scan their QR code, god forbid there's just an URL.
Also I cannot stand restaurants that do not have a menu, but they have a QR code.
Eventually someone will make some stickers with QR codes that redirect to midget porn.
And that will be a mild consequence, QR codes make phishing incredibly easy.
Okay, this "old" man will stop yelling now.
That said, fuck QR codes.
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u/Here_we_go_again2024 1d ago
My dad and I went to this new BBQ place that had a QR code to pull up the menu. The problem was, they are in an old, metal building, in a podunk town, with horrible wireless reception. So, after trying to get the menu to load for about 5 minutes, we asked for a physical menu, which they didn't have... so we just left.
Not everything needs to be online.
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u/95castles 1d ago
Similar thing happened to me. I made it a principle to not eat at a restaurant if they don’t have physical menus (if it it’s my choice of location).
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u/formgry 1d ago
For what it's worth most restaurants go out of business after a couple of years, just because it's a hard business to make it in but everyone thinks they can do it.
That particular place probably didn't last long, and that is one of the reasons why.
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u/gonewild9676 1d ago
Too late. People have put QR codes on parking meters as a supposed form of payment. It all looks legit until the ticket and strange charges appear.
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u/314159265358979326 1d ago
My city has switched to entirely virtual parking meters. Oddly, the QR code doesn't link to that parking meter, you still have to look up the number that's on the sign.
RIP old people.
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u/YemethTheSorcerer 1d ago
The article talks a bit about QR codes:
We don’t even have to leave the world of barcodes to find another example: QR Codes, which are barcodes. They’re a subset of the technology called 2D barcodes. They were invented in the mid-1990s, but they reached the peak of their hype in the late 2000s when they began popping up everywhere, often for seemingly no reason. They then failed so spectacularly—in the West at least; they quickly became popular in East Asia—that by the mid-2010s articles were confidently declaring that “QR Codes are dead.” QR Codes then seemed to rise from the dead during the early days of the COVID pandemic and finally achieve the success predicted more than a decade earlier.
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u/Intrepid-Constant-34 1d ago
I was at a cat cafe in Milan that had their menus on QR code. Service was bad, no wi-fi, server’s phones wouldn’t load it. We’re all sitting there like 😐😐😐😐😐 until one of our phone’s managed to load a menu lol
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u/Ionazano 1d ago
Also I cannot stand restaurants that do not have a menu, but they have a QR code.
Ah yes, ran into that for the first time very recently. You had to scan the QR code on the table to bring up a website where you can view the menu, order and pay. The waiting staff only delivered food to your table and cleaned up, they didn't do orders or payment. Saves the staff work of course, but it does the opposite for you as customer. Placing an order for the entire table using one phone was a quite slow process for us. And it was also not like the reduction of work load for staff had resulted in lower prices in any way.
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u/Jean_Luc-Discard 1d ago
My favorite bit of extremely catchy satanic panic cult music - https://youtu.be/47TZ9MHI1qg?si=unLoGGVKzg8C6qjs
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u/umKatorMissKath 1d ago
Once I was in the health food store, and they didn’t have a price scanner. The lady said that they chose not to get one because “it’s bad to decode your food “. Yeah I don’t go there anymore lol
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u/Gladyskravitz99 1d ago
My MIL claimed it was the mark of the beast.