GS1, the global standards organisation for barcodes, has started to advertise their Sunrise 2027 program for adding 2D barcodes to products.
https://www.gs1digital.link/sunrise-2027/
https://www.gs1us.org/industries-and-insights/by-topic/sunrise-2027
Long story short this adds an 2D barcode to product labels alongside the existing 1D barcode. The 2D barcode gives extra info to the retailer (assuming the manufacturer adds it to the barcode) like batch/lot #, expiry date etc and can also provide a URL for the product to the consumer where they can find out more info about the product. There's even a complete fake brand set up to show off the concept - https://dalgiardino.com/
Since most POS apps are likely going to be confused by 2 barcodes on 1 product and potentially double-charge you for your favourite box of cornflakes the scanner vendors are implementing a feature where they'll only send 1 barcode to the POS system; for legacy scanners that'll be the 1D barcode (like now), for new scanners that can read 2D barcodes it can either be specific GS1 tags or the entire barcode depending on what the POS application wants.
Note that this is already live for some manufacturers and geographies, 2027 is just when it's intended to be deployed globally.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday April 20, @06:42AM
No doubt soon to be correlated with your credit card purchases and loyalty card to figure out if you're too poor to buy fresh products at full price or if you always go for the -30% clearance items, at what date of the month you start heading for the clearance bin, if you always get that steak at the back of the shelf to get the one with the longest expiry, etc.
"Extra info to the retailer" my foot. It'll be primarily extra info for data brokers and marketing sumbitches.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Thursday April 20, @09:30AM (4 children)
Considering how many times I've seen cashiers have to smooth out, or fold some part of a items packaging out of the way just to be able to scan the 1D UPC currently on some products I'm not looking forward to watching cashiers wasting even more time trying to get a 2D barcode to be fuly scanned.
my 2Yen;
Save the 2Ds for situations that actually warrant or benefit from encoding all that extra data. Like ID cards, drivers licenses, and passports.
The 1D barcodes work fine for what they need to do, track merchandise or items for inventory or general identification of said items. Like they have done perfectly well since their adoption.
As the saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @10:15AM (1 child)
> ... cashiers have to smooth ...
When the lines are long at cashiers, I plan ahead for the self-checkout by looking at the bar codes on items to make sure they are easily read by the scanner. Works most of the time...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20, @11:03PM
When the lines are long at the register, I re-evaluate just how much I want that beer.
Maybe leave it somewhere and use the self checkout and save 10 minutes. Especially if I gotta go pee.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ox0000 on Thursday April 20, @02:37PM
QR codes (and 2D codes in general) tend to have quite some error correction encoded in their raw payload. These things are not just a raw sequential one-to-one mapping of information to dots. They contain multiple kinds of error correction and reconstruction to enable a rather large swatch of the code surface to be lost.
For instance: ever seen those 'branded' QR codes? The ones with some stupid logo in the middle(*)? That's what makes these things works: they just punch a hole in the middle of the barcode knowing full well that the QR code contains redundancy and error correction.
It's not unlikely that these 2D codes will be easier to read by the scanners than the 1D ones. This may actually be one of the major scenarios for why this transition was being considered in the first place (not the only one though, I'm sure data thieves were heavily involved as well).
While I'm no fan of being able to almost uniquely identity an instance of a product, there are a couple of other interesting scenario's that this enables: make the 2D code contain a link which the manufacturer can now use for instance to display recall information or whatever. Something that takes you straight to the manufacturer could be useful, if for nothing else but attribution.
Now that I say that, I'm sure that a whole new industry of the equivalent of DNS/WHOIS privacy guards will spring up to shield shady manufacturers against being identified.
(*) that's because Marketing decided that every single surface of the branded product you're about to purchase must also contain additional, more of that same branding that screams at the customer about which brand of product it is that they are buying. Wouldn't want to get into a situation where the customer picks up a product to purchase with clear, large branding on the front including what kind of thing it is (say, cookies by brand X), and then have the customer inadvertently turn the product over on its back and *gasp* have them forget which brand they just bought... *That* would be an obvious disaster!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ox0000 on Thursday April 20, @04:00PM
But they are broken:
1. One of the primary reasons these things exist is for cashiers, and you described how they have to smooth things out, thus losing time. Cashiers are graded on "scans/customers per minute and not hitting quotas leads to badness. Grocery stores are one of the parties asking for this. And they have a lot of sway in their market.
2. Their data is limited to "just a number" and is therefore not attributable (case in point: go to an Aldi/Trader Joe's and look at their bar codes, then go to another grocery store and do the same; you'll find that A/TJ uses their own barcode, which is just a dumb internal SKU number, that means nothing outside of their own little niche ecosystem)
3. Their data is limited in use and the industry is hungry for more data, on stock and on customers (in some cases, those two are one and the same), because they want to swim in it (not use it, just swim in it).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 20, @09:21PM
RFID tags don't have any ambiguity in scanning.
They are also difficult to find and remove from merchandise by shoplifters. (Unless they keep up with technology.)
There would be two kinds of scanners.
1. The existing ones that recognize only the 1D barcodes.
2. The new scanners that recognize the 2D barcodes, or the older 1D barcodes if no directly adjacent new 2D barcode is present.
The existing scanners continue to send what they are designed to send to the POS system.
The new scanners would be smart enough not to send two charges to the POS for the same scan.
The new type of scanner sees one of three things:
A. An old 1D barcode -- it sends that
B. A new 2D barcode -- it sends that
C. Both an old and new barcode, it sends the new barcode, unless that was unreadable, in which case it sends the old barcode if that was readable, otherwise it beeps to make the cashier to re-scan the item.
I don't see how you would get double charged for cornflakes.
Kellogg's cornflakes were a big commercial success even though they were a miserable failure at their original intended purpose to get people to stop masturbating.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...