There's no price on this and the whole line is waiting

The cashier sent a stock boy to Aisle 6 to find out what my olives cost. Everyone behind me now knows about my olives. — Shopper, 1958

Norman Woodland quit graduate school over a grocer's checkout problem. In 1949, on Miami Beach, he said he ran his fingers through the sand and stretched Morse code's dots and dashes into bars. Most people at the beach aren't thinking about groceries. To read the bars in a store you'd need a laser, and nobody had invented one yet. It was 25 years before a store scanned one. It was a pack of Juicy Fruit gum.

Still bugs us: the one item that won't scan, so the cashier types in the number by hand.

The full file

The patent was mostly for a bull's-eye. Woodland and his partner Bernard Silver drew it as rings of lines, so it could be read from any direction. The patent was granted October 7, 1952.

The bull's-eye lost. It smeared on the printing presses, and the smallest flaw made it unreadable. The striped code grocers picked in 1973 was designed by George Laurer at IBM. Woodland worked at IBM by then, but the winning design wasn't his.

He'd already sold the patent. IBM says he and Silver got $15,000 for it. "I was way ahead of the technology," Woodland said. Barcodes get scanned about 6 billion times a day now. Being early pays about as well as being wrong.

Relates to No. 06400.