June 24, 2011 11:06 pm
Pioneer who helped transmit the barcode
ByPhil Davison
Motivated not by profit but by frustratingly long supermarket queues, Alan Haberman was the man most responsible for introducing and standardising the black-and-white stripes and numbers symbol now known as the barcode. It was 37 years ago tomorrow, at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, that shopper Clyde Dawson handed a jumbo 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum to Sharon Buchanan at the check-out. On it was the first commercially used barcode, a breakthrough initiated by Haberman, a career retail executive. He also became the scourge of the shoplifter since the barcode would later be used as a security tool at store exits around the world.
Miss Buchanan held the yellow pack against a newfangled optical scanner. Beep went the Juicy Fruit, 67 cents popped up on the screen and the rest, zillions of worldwide beeps later, is history. The barcode, described by Haberman as “a little footprint”, saves tens of billions of dollars a year for supermarkets in labour and inventory costs, as well as vastly improving customer service. Every day, at least 5bn barcodes are scanned in retail outlets somewhere in the world.
Airlines also use them to track passengers’ luggage. Courier companies use them to track packages. Maternity wards rely on them to ensure the right baby goes home with the right mother. Runners in major marathons set off with barcodes on their vests and libraries rely on them. Many modern artists have used the crushed-piano-keyboard symbol in their work. As for that original pack of Juicy Fruit, it is now, unchewed and unopened, in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History in Washington.
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Haberman, who has died at the age of 81, did not invent the barcode. That is generally credited to Philadelphia students Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, who came up with a system based on stretching the dots and dashes of Morse code and patented the idea in 1952. But the cost and initial unreliability of scanning equipment made the idea a non-starter at that time. After standing in long check-out queues for 20 years, Haberman co-founded and chaired a “symbol section committee” of senior industry executives to standardise what became known formally as the Universal Product Code.
Manufacturers and retailers were reluctant at first but Haberman, chief executive of the First National Stores (Finast) chain of supermarkets, was persuasive. Highly liquid dinners at some of America’s finest restaurants and a “boy’s night out” to watch the film Deep Throat swung it for Haberman. On April 1 1973, his committee unanimously agreed on a standardised UPC. Haberman described the barcode as “a kind of Esperanto that works for everyone”.
The committee considered more than a dozen versions, including one based on multicoloured polka dots and another using a bull’s-eye design. In the end, it opted for a combination of black-and-white lines and numbers, based on Woodland and Silver’s idea but developed by George Laurer at IBM.
Its importance was not clear immediately as wholesalers, retailers and customers remained suspicious. Some customers believed barcodes were a form of surveillance (some still do). During the early days, Business Week magazine ran the headline “The Supermarket Scanner That Failed”. Scanners were expensive and it was well into the 1980s before America’s big retail players, including Kmart and Walmart, adopted the UPC.
Haberman’s committee evolved into the Uniform Product Code Council, now known as GS1, a global, not-for-profit organisation that issues and administers barcodes.
In his later years, Haberman supported efforts to take the barcode forward, including the new generation of two-dimensional, cellphone-scannable barcodes which allow consumers to track prices, for example of a house where they’ve seen a “For Sale” sign. He was also a great believer in radio-frequency identification technology, which uses tiny transmitters. RFID is increasingly being used in stores to prevent shoplifting, its progress slowed only by the cost of the silicon chips required. Haberman predicted breakfast cereal boxes will eventually contain a radio transmitter. He was a driving force behind the Auto-ID Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was deeply involved in setting standards for RFID.
Alan Lloyd Haberman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 27 1929. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in American history and literature in 1951, adding an MBA from Harvard Business School two years later. He worked for two and a half years as a stock analyst on Wall Street before being appointed executive vice-president of the Hills Supermarkets chain, based on Long Island, New York.
In 1965, Hills merged with E.J. Korvette, one of the US’s earliest discount department stores, and Haberman was named president. He later moved on as CEO of Finast.
Haberman spent his retirement years in Natick, near Boston. He is survived by his wife Natalie and children Arthur and Jeanette.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011
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