67 Cents of Gum: The First Barcode Ever Scanned
On June 26, 1974, a cashier in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's gum for 67 cents — the first UPC barcode ever read at a checkout, launching the era of automated retail.
At 8:01 a.m. on June 26, 1974, the most familiar sound in shopping was heard for the very first time.
The scene was a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, where the first supermarket scanners had just been installed — ten of them, built by Spectra-Physics and National Cash Register. The "shopper" was Clyde Dawson, Marsh's head of research and development, and the cashier was Sharon Buchanan. Dawson lifted a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum off the belt, and Buchanan slid it across the scanner's glass plate. A helium-neon laser read the black-and-white bars, a computer matched the pattern to its price, and the register rang up 67 cents. The checkout line would never be the same.
The choice of gum was no accident. Nobody had been sure a barcode could be printed on something as small and cheap as a pack of chewing gum, and Wrigley had solved the problem — so Dawson picked it deliberately to prove the system worked on the hardest case.
The idea had been decades in the making. In 1949, inventor Joe Woodland sketched the concept in the sand on a Miami Beach, inspired by Morse code — information encoded in thick and thin lines instead of dots and dashes. He patented a circular "bull's-eye" design, but the lasers and computers needed to read it did not exist yet. In 1970, grocery executives formed an industry committee to create a single universal code, and IBM engineer George Laurer designed the rectangular striped pattern that became the Universal Product Code — easier to print and scan than Woodland's circles.
The winning design was elegantly simple: 59 black-and-white bars and 12 human-readable digits encoding the manufacturer and the product. Woodland's original co-inventor, Bernard Silver, never saw it take off — he died in 1963 — and Woodland himself, an IBM engineer by then, watched from the sidelines as another IBM engineer, George Laurer, finalized the rectangular format. Adoption was slow at first; scanners were expensive, and the system did not become widespread until the 1980s. But once it did, there was no going back.
The payoff was enormous. Barcodes sped up checkout, cut pricing errors, and gave stores real-time inventory data for the first time — one study estimated annual savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone. The system spread far beyond supermarkets: today the barcode standard, overseen by the organization GS1, is scanned billions of times a day in more than 110 countries. That 67-cent pack of gum, kept by Dawson afterward, became retail history.
A note on the photo: this story is published without one. We could not find a verified, freely licensed image of the 1974 scanner or the first scanned pack of gum, so rather than risk an uncertain image, this story runs without a photograph.
