Every few years, the small town of Troy in Miami County, Ohio celebrates an historic occasion that for a few giddy weeks puts it on the world map of the grocery trade. At the time, National Cash ...

Bar codes turn 40 this week, but they aren’t over the hill yet. It was a Thursday morning when the first unique sticker of white and black lines facilitated the purchase of a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit ...

On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum using something novel — the black and white stripes of a universal bar code. The ...

In the wake of 2008 product scares involving melamine-tainted pet foods, lead-tainted toys, and melamine-tainted milk products, all originating in China, consumers in the U.S. understandably became ...

Sharp-eyed readers have noticed a change in the bar codes on some coupons, and they wrote in to ask about them. Q: "I have used coupons for many years, but I notice that most coupons now have two bar ...

The demise of Shelfie, a tool that allowed customers to link their print books to e-books, got me thinking about bar codes. Obviously, one method of linking print to its digital metadata is through ...