19741776 Club
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit crosses an NCR scanner in Troy, Ohio; the register reads 67 cents
At 8:01 a.m. at the Marsh supermarket, a cashier rings up the first Universal Product Code ever scanned at a retail checkout.
By the summer of 1974, grocery checkout lines were slow, error-prone, and manually keyed — a problem the industry had been trying to solve for years. At 8:01 a.m. on June 26, 1974, a cashier at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, lifted a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum across an NCR scanner, and the register rang up 67 cents. It was the first time a Universal Product Code had ever been scanned at a retail checkout. A facsimile of that gum packet eventually landed in the Smithsonian's American history museum…
