Life before barcodes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

As a teenager I worked in a convenience store.

There were no bar codes. Most items were slapped with a price sticker, but not all. The candy aisle was completely sticker-free.

And above all that, I needed to know which products were subject to tax!

And, of course, the cash register didn’t provide answers on change, and there were no bank cards.

Thinking back, I have no idea how I managed all this. I’m amazed that, as a 16 year old I could juggle all this and clean and mop the store at closing time.

Do you recall life before barcodes?

2

I remember hating price changes in a grocery store. After stamping prices on every can and box as we shelved them - we had to go back and sticker and restamp the boxes and erase and restamp the cans. Then we changed the labels on the shelves.

No memory of taxable or not. Don’t remember it as a big deal in Pennsylvania.

3

Sure do. I was born in '46.

First grocery store job I worked in produce. Most stuff was per pound price and no calculator scales. He’d this long cylinder with prices per pound marked. Read across and get as close as you could.

Registers were all keys that you had to hit for each item. No scanners because no UPC codes. First item to get a UPC code was Wrigley gum.

GaryM

4

In my family store, we just entered the amount. Inventory was handled by seeing if we were about to run out of something.

I did work in Spencer Gifts in the 70s. Their price tags had a portion that you tore off; they were sent to the home office each day, where they were read by a computer to keep up with inventory. If the card was lost, you wrote down the number on a sheet of paper. The cards were about 3/4" x 2".

5

I worked in a Baskin-Robbins in high school (mid 70s). We had the old fashioned type of cash register, with four (or was it five?) columns of buttons 0 through 9 so you could type in the price of each item. There were only so many things we sold so the prices were easy to learn. After the register totaled them up, you looked at a laminated printout to see what the sales tax would be, and typed that in too. Then the customer hands you cash money, and you “count up” to their tendered cash to make change.

6

I worked bagging groceries and stocking. I was given a stamper and box cutter. I remember opening a box, price stamp all the cans, and arrange on the shelves. We also had price stickers for items we couldn’t stamp.

Cashier rang up the prices at sale.

We came in a couple times a year to do Inventory. That meant accounting for every item on the shelves and what was in the stockroom.

I never dealt with reordering supplies. I’d guess the manager walked the aisles and made a list of things that needed to be ordered.

7

My store still doesn’t use them. Our cash registers are basically glorified calculators. About half of the items are labeled (with a price gun) the rest of them the cashiers memorize. Most of them learn them within a few days, then it’s just a matter of keeping up with changes. A few of them, even after months of working their still have to rely on a cheat sheet. The people that write them all down, in most cases, are doing not because they can’t memorize them, but because (how to put it nicely) they’re not trying to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen one of my cashiers frantically scanning sheets of paper trying to figure out how much something is just to say ‘uh, it’s $1.49/lb, but it’s also right there’. I always tell new cashiers not to spend too much time learning prices of things that can see from where they’re standing (about half the store). It just slows you down. It’s like that college teacher that would let you bring a note card into the exam. It’s a trap. If you spent all week trying to see how much you can jam on to it you don’t study and you can’t find anything on it.

8

I never worked retail, but barcodes came in while I was overseas in USAF. When I left the states they didn’t exist much of anyplace and when I came back they were everywhere. Shazam!

The irritant I remember most as a consumer back in the price tag era was the hassle at the register if an item had no tag. So you’d check each item as you put it in your basket to ensure it had a tag. The pisser was when they (usually not a grocery store) only had a couple of something left and neither one had a tag. You could decide to buy it, knowing it’d take an extra 10 minutes at the register. Or you could decide to skip it. I usually skipped it.

Funny now we have the same issue with the 4-digit part number on fruits & veg. If that little tag is missing from all of your kumquats, there’s no way the checker can ring them up. He/she probably knows the codes for russet potatoes and red delicious apples and that’s about it. “Hey mister, what is this?” is a question I still get fairly often in 2017.

I often tell the clerk as they’re searching for that tag that soon the fruit will be engineered so the barcodes grow right in the flesh like a tattoo. Sometimes they believe me. :smiley:

I recall everyone poking fun at George Bush Senior at some campaign photo op at a grocery store showing his “Ordinary Joe” skills. He’d never seen a grocery store UPC scanner and was amazed by it. Although they’d been deployed nationwide for 5+ years by then. Sheltered rich life much?

9

I really only have one memory regarding this…

I was probably in junior high when stores in my area started using barcodes and scanners. I remember my friend’s mom was deeply suspicious that the scanners were going to rip her off and charge more than the tag price. At this point most everything still had a sticker tag on them as well as the barcode. One time we were with her at the grocery store and like two teenage girls are likely to do we are chattering away. Her mom looked at us and told us to shut because she had to concentrate…she wasn’t going to let this computer rip her off…and she said it loud enough that everyone heard. She checked every item to make sure the scanner got it right. The clerk rolled his eyes and we were so embarrassed.

10

When I worked in a movie theater in about 1986, not only did things not have bar codes, but we didn’t have a register or anything like that. We (all teenagers) were expected to add up all the candy, popcorn, and drinks a customer ordered in our head, and make change the same way.

Once a week we did inventory by manually counting all the candy, drink glasses, and popcorn tubs, presumably to see how accurate we were.

I’m amazed thinking back on that. Math? In our heads? Quickly enough that customers didn’t complain? Does that exist anymore?

11

As for your first paragraph, it’s already possible to use something like an inkjet printer or a laser to mark the PLU code right on the skin of the fruit.

And as for your second paragraph, I seem to remember George H. W. Bush also being asked the price of a gallon of milk, and then being declared out of touch for not knowing what it was. In retrospect, I have more sympathy for him. As you mentioned, yes, he was rich enough that he probably didn’t need to shop for himself. Plus he was from a generation where the gender roles were more traditional, so it’s entirely plausible that he wasn’t familiar with supermarket shopping.

12

No, and kids these days are awful, like really, really bad. Look, I get it, you accidentally opened the drawer without putting in the amount the customer gave you and now you’re flustered or have tunnel vision, or worse, the customer is telling you how much the change is*. Kids (mine is in public school, common core and all) are taught how to make change in grade school, but it’s almost like they need to be retaught in high school. Making change is different than regular arithmetic. If for no other reason you have to do it in your head and, personally, I hate that counting backwards in your head stuff. There are better ways, at least for me. I grew up running a register and when I got the money from the customer I would try to come up with the change before the register told me. I got very good at it.

On the one hand, I’m not that surprised when I see one of my high school employees doing $20.00-$13.77, with a line of customers and trying to make sure she’s going it right after a lifetime of ‘when are we going to need this in real life’.
On the other hand, I’ve seen, first hand, my employees using their calculator to figure out their 50% discount on food. No line, no pressure, literally doing $1.99 divided by 2, 99¢ divided by 2 etc. I don’t know the odd (as opposed to even) was throwing them of if they’re just that reliant on a calculator. I’ve walked by, in those cases and said, uhhh that’s a dollar, that’s 50 cents.

Oh and in the first case if I see them with the calculator and see a 20 dollar bill out and $13.87 and say 'hold up it’s 6…20…3, yup the change is $6.23, I’ll get a ‘how’d you do that’ from them and I’m like ‘uh, aren’t you the one in high school?’. The few times (post college) people have said ‘well, that’s because you’re a math major’ my normal response is something along the lines of ‘yeah, but I didn’t spend 4 years doing arithmetic, you’re en English major but you didn’t memorize the dictionary, right?’.

Regarding the Bush thing, what you said is probably true, but some people also don’t know the prices of stuff they buy on such a regular basis. I mean, if he didn’t know if it was a dollar or twelve dollars, yeah, that’s one thing, but if he didn’t know if it was $1.99 or $4.99 that’s different. I buy, for example, sour cream every week. I’m not price shopping, I almost always get it from the same store, it is what it is, I don’t even look at the price.
TL;DR, kids learn, but many can’t do when put into real world situations with a bit of pressure on them.

13

Part of my education in the self-checkout era was how to deal with fruits & veg. I once scanned a bunch of stuff through self-checkout but then, faced with veggies with non-scannable numbers on them, I went over to the Eagle-Eyed Supervisor Lady Who Watches for Cheaters, threw the veggies down, and said I don’t know what to do with these.

She patiently rang them in and then explained to me how I could do it myself next time. Just enter the product code, and the omnipotent robot will order you to place the item down to be weighed, and then it will magically spit out a price. Yay! Every customer his own cashier! Eventually I might get to be like the really good ones and actually remember the codes for green onions and red peppers! And of course you get to learn self-bagging skills, too. :rolleyes: I’m imagining the grocery store of the future where the only sounds are random whirrs and beeps, and the occasional buzz of a laser beam targeting a miscreant shoplifter.

14

I was in Belgium a couple summers ago, and eggs had inkjet-like barcodes on them. Each one!

I was a pharmacy technician in a hospital pharmacy in high school. We did very little in the way of retail business (basically just oddball, hard-to-find drugs prescribed by our physicians), but we still had price stickers on the bottom of each bottle of medication … in code. To this day I am not sure why we needed that, since pharmacy employees were the only people to actually see these stickers, and every order from a supplier included the price of every item we purchased in plain real numbers. But part of the job was memorizing that code.

Much later I spent about a year working a second job for a commercial inventory company. At that point in history some items had bar codes and others did not. We could sweep a store whose items were mostly barcoded (think the mass market paperback sections in Barnes and Noble) in about half the time of a similar sized store whose items were mostly not. Places like Michaels and Home Depot that have a lot of little items in bins take forever.

15

When I worked for Frank’s Nursery & Crafts in the late 80s and early-mid 90s, it was too early for bar code scanners (for us anyway) but computerized inventory was well underway. So each object had a SKU number we had to include when making the price tag. Then cashiers had to enter that six digit number each time which was more tedious than just entering a price. Of course, if the SKU was wrong or illegible, it meant sending someone to find the item on the shelf and hope that those items had a valid/readable SKU which they probably didn’t since everything was tagged as one shipment. Or hoping that it was stocked in the correct spot and there was a shelf tag with the correct SKU. Or looking up the SKU in the manager’s office cubical thing. It was a lot of fun.

16

It’s kind of ridiculous if you didn’t know how to input your own vegetables. How difficult is it to punch in the sticker code?

17

My wife once worked at a clothing store. Once a year they had to do a complete inventory for taxes, insurance, etc. Management would close the store for a day and the entire staff had to write down every item by hand. Then the auditors checked that against inventory records, line by line.

18

Not difficult at all. But when you’re in a hurry and your experience at the self-checkout is scan and go, and you know that there are definitely things it doesn’t handle, it’s not immediately obvious that there’s a mode of operation that says “I want to enter a manual code and then weigh something”. Why would you even assume that there’s a scale there?

19

Are you kidding me?
That’s so intuitively obvious that … well, never mind.

20

Actually, I’m more amazed at cashiers today who know all the product codes for produce. That’s probably just as difficult as knowing prices of candy bars, (which tend to have similar prices, anyway).