This month marks the 35th anniversary of the Universal Product Code — or UPC, as its friends call it — which was officially swiped for the first time on June 26, 1974, at a supermarket in Ohio and brought to Canada a year later. The decades that followed saw everything from conspiracy theories about the UPC's role in government tracking to a Price Waterhouse study linking it to some $17 billion in retailer savings at the grocery level alone.
But despite being recognized by the Smithsonian as one of the great breakthrough technologies in history, with bar codes scanned more than 10 billion times a day, being of a certain age means cosmetic surgery is on the horizon.
Chief among the planned nips and tucks is the reinvention of UPCs as Electronic Product Codes (EPCs), which experts say are poised to become the new industry standard.
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