In the early days of retail, shops were much simpler, and buying items was mostly a manual and slow task. The shopkeeper would ring each item up separately by hand, entering in the prices on a cash register one by one until the total amount of the bill was revealed.
Today, the retail industry has evolved to meet the needs of today’s fast paced world by giving consumers a much faster checkout and pricing process. All of this is possible with the use of the barcode. A barcode is an encoding tag or label that is placed on all merchandise that allows computers to track and ring up products far faster and more accurately than transactions mad by hand. For every two keystrokes made by a human, a barcode can read one whole product’s information. This is approximately 10 times faster than if a person were to enter in the information by hand. In addition, the amount of errors made in a computer system by items with a barcode is a great deal less than those made by humans.
Barcodes are also very useful when it comes to production of magnetic cards. As you can store vast quantities of information easily and effectively.
For approximately every 1,000 keystrokes made by a human being, there are an average of 10 errors. With barcodes, for every 10,000 scans made by an optical scanner, there are an average of only 1 error. This should be evidence enough that when it comes to routine calculations you can’t beat a computer!