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Tracking and Integrating the Consumer and the Commodity
Before consumer opinions could automatically be solicited within the production loop, however, products themselves (or ‘‘business inventories’’) would have to be incorporated into existing archival technologies. The Universal Product Code (UPC) provided the means by which individual commodities or larger shipments of products could be digitally coded through an imprint on packaging material. The UPC’s preliminary applications in large supermarket chains in the 1970s were soon expanded to the inventory and shipping requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense and the auto industry in 1982.The UPC consists of two sets of five-digit numbers below a series of machine-readable coded bars. The first set of numbers identifies the product’s manufacturer, and the second set identifies the product’s content (such as size, weight, and flavor) (Harrell, Hutt & Allen 1976). As Burke (1984, 1–2) reminds us, bar codes are therefore yet another means of storing data. They differ from punch cards or disks in that they are placed directly on commodities:
Bar coding is a memory form. Printing black bars on white paper is directly analogous to recording plus or minus bars in a magnetic medium. In fact, the basic formats used in these two technologies are identical. While information recorded in magnetic media can be packed at higher densities, and can be erased and re-recorded, printing bar codes on plain paper is much less expensive for memory applications.
Another defining characteristic of the UPC (compared to earlier archival and tracking systems) is its use of optical character- recognition (OCR) technologies. Before the widespread adoption of UPC technology, inventories were categorized and tracked in very large quantities or were predetermined in easily quantifiable shipment sizes (such as the bushel or the dozen). OCR technology, however, could easily allow computer databases and other computer programs to scan letters and bar codes as digitized and individuated inventory information. The scannable bar code, in other words, facilitated the individual commodity’s entrance into a larger computerized network or business loop. Moreover, OCR technology also introduced the storage capabilities of magnetic stripes onto personal identification cards, entering specific aspects of consumer behavior into computerized systems of inventory control, marketing, and sales and more closely tracking the ever elusive object of the niche-market researcher’s desire—the consumer.
