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So, when you stop in a store and scan a soda, the beeper beams lasers and the barcode becomes
numbers.
This thing, though, isn’t free, no, because of these guys.
But enough of that poetry poppycock.
This is the headquarters of the GS1 Organization which basically runs the world’s barcodes.
They’ve created and maintain a common standard of barcode that works anywhere.
No matter if you scan a product at a Tesco in Thurso or a Coles in Canberra, the machine
will recognize what it means thanks to this organization, but here’s how it works.
A normal barcode has 95 bars that are each either black or white.
These first three always look like this, the middle five always look like this, and the
last three always look like this.
That’s to differentiate the different sections.
The remaining 84 bars are split into groupings of seven in order to make twelve sections.
Each grouping of seven corresponds to a number.
For example, this means zero, this means one, this means two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, and nine, unless they’re on the right side, because simplicity sucks.
For the groupings of seven on the right, this means one, this means two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, and nine.
Got it?
Good, because the main difference between the codes for numbers on the left and the
codes for numbers on the rights is the number of white bars.
For example, the code for six on the left has two white spaces while the code for six
on the right has five white spaces.
For nine it’s four on the left and three on the right.
You might see a pattern, all the codes for numbers on the left have even numbers of white
spaces, all the codes for numbers on the right have odd numbers of white spaces.
This is so, if the code is upside down, the scanner knows to read the code from the opposite
direction.
If it sees the codes with odd numbers of white spaces on the left, the machine knows to start
reading from the right.
But before being able to make barcodes, you need a company prefix because the first bit
of any barcode is devoted to identifying the company that makes the product and then the
first three digits of that identify the country where that company is from.
For example, this cream cheese, which was one of five things in my fridge, starts with
country code 622 which corresponds to Switzerland where the European headquarters of the manufacturer,
Mondelēz International, is.
Each country worldwide has it’s own code, and don’t worry America, you’re still
number one, but also 2 thru 19, 30 thru 39, and 60 thru 139 because big countries need
lots of codes to allow for lots of companies.
After the country code comes the company code, but the number of digits varies.
Basically, whatever space that isn’t filled by the company prefix, with the exception
of the 12th digit, can be used for product codes.
So, the GS1 organization prices the company codes based off their length.
You can buy a ten digit company prefix, which includes the country code, for only $250 since
there are 10 million of them for each country code, but then you would only have one free
digit left so you could only have 10 different products.
Therefore, if you’re a much bigger company you want to have a much shorter prefix.
So, GS1 sells company prefixes as short as six digits but they cost $10,500 since there
are only a thousand of them out there for each country code.
With a six digit company prefix, you can have as many as 100,000 different products.
The product codes, living here between the company prefix and the 12th digit, don’t
really have a common standard so each company can set their own codes.
They all go into a central database so any store worldwide selling this cream cheese,
for example, can know the code.
But then there’s this 12th digit.
This is there to make sure that the scanner read the rest of the digits correctly.
It’s called the check digit.
What you do to calculate the check digit is to add the numbers from all the odd-numbered
positions, multiply by three, add all the even numbered digits, then subtract that number
from the nearest multiple of ten.
Easy, right?
At least if you’re a machine.
If the result equals the final number, the machine knows that it read the barcode correctly.
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