Changing the World with a Label
Last year on a camping trip Lisa Warden and her daughter Jessica stopped for groceries in an extremely small town. While shopping, Jessica kept hearing an unfamiliar noise and asked what it was, but Lisa was not sure what she was talking about. Because Lisa remembers the cash register age she did not realize Jessica had never heard one actually working in a store. When they were in the check out line Jessica pointed at the old cash register and told her mom that is the noise she has been hearing. Lisa laughed and tried to explain that at one time all stores had cash registers like this one. Jessica was born in the computer age and could not comprehend the thought of cashiers and baggers doing so much work. Before bar codes, cashiers had to look at each price tag and manually key enter the dollar amount. This made the consumer have to wait in long check out lines, which did not make for a pleasant experience. Because the cashier was busy entering each item's price, he or she did not have time to bag the merchandise. The retailer had to hire another person to put the products into bags, and this increased the prices. Ed Leibowitz reported that supermarket's net margins were one percent in the more profitable times, but
Glanz, William. Black, White and Silver; Museum marks 25 Years of UPC. The Washington Times 30 Sept 1999, B9. In the retail business, the bar code has shortened the check out lines, making the consumer's shopping trip a happier adventure. The cashier is more cheerful with the customer because he or she does not have to concentrate on the price of each item. The customer's most bought items will always be on the shelves because of the efficiency of the bar code updating the daily inventory. "Every night the exact number of grocery items sold that day is replaced by the distribution center, and the store's shelves can be replenished the next morning" (Collins 13). Because this process is so exact, marketing products has improved, satisfying the customer and increasing the merchant's profits. As managed care drives providers to reduce inventories, better understand utilization rates, and reduce costs, it will generate new databases out of necessity. One of these databases, and the focus of this article, will be generated from electronic scanners that will scan or read bar code from the myriad of packaged products any provider will utilize (e.g., gauze pads, aspirins, foam pads, disposables of all kinds, etc.). This new database will not be developed to improve clinical pathways, neural networks, or care paths, although these can hopefully be integrated at a later date. The provider-generated database, as in the case of supermarket scanner data, will revolutionize inventory management, allow precise utilization to be measured, and allow health care and medical products manufacturers to know their market shares and the effectiveness of promotions (Fox 44). No longer needed are the manual cash registers of yesteryear. Bar codes have revolutionized businesses with better inventory control and helping satisfy their customers needs. Twenty-five years of using bar codes in the retail industry has only improved with age. It has moved on to bigger and better objectives, along with staying where it originated. It is hard to believe such a small thing--in size--could change the world in such immense ways. Hartston, William. Good Questions: Cracking the Solution to the Supermarket. Independent 24 Jan. 1994, sec. misc: 30.
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2972
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)
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