35th Anniversary of the first barcode scanner transaction

[Brian Lutz]

Over at Gizmodo today, they have a post which points out that it was 35 years ago today when the first commercial transaction using a barcode scanner was made at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy Ohio. The post includes an interesting YouTube video in which the project coordinator shares some memories of the project.

http://gizmodo.com/5302930/happy-35th-birthday-bar-code

[krogerclerk]

Troy, OH was chosen for several reasons, one its proximity to Dayton, OH, hq of NCR with the Marsh's location already having the NCR electronic cash register, only the scanners would need t be added, and two, probably for Marsh's the biggest reason, Marsh's was making a push into Kroger's home market of Cinncinnati/Dayton and the publicity was free and they had one upped Kroger. Otherwise Troy is an ordinary small town that would have been an odd choice for NCR to implement its first fully functioning scanner.

Marsh's still operates in Troy, OH, but never achieved the goal of being a major player in Kroger's home market. Kroger is still based in Cincinnati and still dominant in the region, but NCR has gone from being an AT&T subsidiary in the 90's to once again and independent company, that has announced relocating to suburban Atlanta, but IBM has become the standard of supermarket scanning with NCR and Fujitsu basically offering IBM clones.

[rich]

Marsh had avoided large markets (except Ft Wayne) for a long time, including Indianapolis, where they finally took advantage of National/Standard's decline (they bought the DC) and Jewel's failure to take root (they bought the stores). In the Cincinnati-Dayton area, they built stores in exurban areas and surrounding small markets--county seat towns like Xenia and Troy. In the secondary markets, they positioned themselves like Albers (a strong 2nd in Cinti for many years) with S&H Green Stamps and in some cases entered markets that Albers had departed. They never expanded beyond the outer suburbs in Dayton and Cincy and probably did not want to commit to the large scale expansion or media expenses. Many of these stores were gone by the 90s, while others were converted to their Lo-Bill discount format. Some of the stores close to Cincinnati were sold during the years that financier Carl Lindner had a large stake in Marsh. Lindner had a controlling stake in Thriftway and probably wanted to limit its competition. Lindner engineered the ill-fated sale of Thriftway to Winn-Dixie, which basically did in what once had been a well positioned but distant second place chain.