September 16, 2026
Before 1974, a supermarket didn’t know what it had sold that day. Not precisely, by line – until someone counted it. Prices were put onto products with sticky labels by a price gun, checkout colleagues keyed every price by hand and stock was managed by a combination of eye and experience.
That changed on 26 June 1974, when a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, and became the first commercial use of the barcode.
Most retailers looked at this technology and saw the potential to speed up checkouts and put an end to hand-pricing every item. Both were true, but considering the high cost of scanners and the systems behind them, the financials didn’t work. By the end of the decade, only 1% of grocery stores had adopted barcodes, and in 1976, BusinessWeek magazine ran an article titled, “The Supermarket Scanner that Failed.”
But one percent of retailers saw something different. Barcodes weren’t just about faster tills and easier pricing – they provided a valuable record of everything the store had sold, in complete detail. If you know what’s been sold, you know what to order, and stock tracking and ordering can both be automated. Ranges could expand beyond anything a manual system could cope with. Category management became possible, then necessary. Supply chain evolved from a logistics function to a science. Two decades later, the same data made Clubcard possible.
Retailers in 1995 (Clubcard’s first year) were not just 1974 retailers with new scanners. They were vastly different organisations with entirely different functions, skills and economics. This period drove huge retail growth and innovation, all started and enabled by barcodes, but almost none of that had appeared in the original business case.
The barcode was the catalyst for innovation, but not the reason. What set apart the 1% of retailers who invested in scanners wasn’t that they saw a way to scan things – they saw an opportunity to reinvent their whole business. And retailers today face a very similar choice.
As discussed, the barcode did more than record what a store sold. It made it possible for retail businesses to track and trace products in near real-time, and then follow that data. Ordering, buying and stock decisions moved out of the individual store to the centre of the business, because that’s where the data sat, and where technology could handle the volume of information. In many retail businesses today, there is almost nothing left for a store to decide.
Years of data-driven optimisation and centralisation has enabled retail to scale and accelerate everything from SKU count to product ranges, in physical and digital storefronts. We can get product to the right place at the right time, just in time.
In the post barcode era, supermarkets became three distinct businesses in one: buying, moving and selling, each relying on different data and taking a different approach to reach its goal.
The barcode reshaped a whole industry, helping drive years of exceptional growth and productivity, followed by several years optimising that success. But productivity growth across the sector has been flat for 15 years, which is what happens when you run out of things to optimise.
What’s left is hidden between buying, moving and selling – places that no individual function can see, or is incentivised to look for. It’s where the customer can’t return their online order in-store – the sort of experience that shouldn’t exist, but all too often does. If your systems can’t share data in the same format or use the same definitions, your view of the customer experience is going to be limited.
In too many retail organisations, nobody owns these definitions across the business. Functions struggle to get agreement across their boundaries and this is where a macro view of the organisation is required.
Nobody can say for sure how digitisation, automation or AI will change retail, but there is broad consensus about their disruptive potential. The next ten years will be worked out much the way the barcode story was: by doing it. And the choice is the 1974 choice, a faster till or a reinvented business.
This is where the comparison with 1974 plays in our favour. Before the barcode, there was no data to read: what a store had sold sat in a manager’s head or on a handwritten sheet, and it stayed there. The barcode’s job was to create the record in the first place. Retail today starts from a different position. Every silo, buying, moving, selling, is sitting on billions of data points, each one relatively well optimised inside its own functional silo. What’s missing isn’t the data. It’s that it doesn’t sit in one place, in one format, meaning one thing.
Every previous attempt at a view across the business needed the silo boundaries resolved first: agree the definitions, name the owner, get the systems talking, then integrate. This is the first technology that doesn’t wait for that. AI doesn’t respect boundaries. It can read across the organisation and hand the result back in a form that a human (or agent) can act on, using data that already exists, even where it was never built to join up.
Reading across the business is not the same as acting across. Acting takes architecture, both technological and organisational, and it takes incentives that span the enterprise. Build on the multiple definitions of availability you have today and AI won’t resolve the disagreement, it will automate it, faster than anyone can catch . Do that while an agent is acting without a human in the loop, and you have handed the decision to whichever definition was wired in first, or whichever one the agent judges best.
The returns will behave as they did before, too. Nobody in 1974 set out to invent category management, and nobody was predicting a store carrying tens of thousands of lines, or loyalty programmes. If we demand a use case first, it’s the barcode story all over again: narrow scope inside the existing silo, insufficient ROI, and the risk of falling behind the retailers that use it to reinvent.
We’re not talking about a single technology solution. It’s making data clear, structured, accessible and consistent. It’s definitions that hold across functions, because agreeing them is what transforms reading across the business into acting across it. The ability to surface results wherever it best sits. This might sound simple, but most retail organisations are still running systems and architecture built for the barcode era rather than for always-on, democratised access. Organisational structures, governance and even culture are designed to optimise within the three functional silos.
The temptation is to start with technology. However, an organisation that hasn’t thought about how it needs to evolve will probably design technology inside the structures it already has.
I have spent my career on both sides of this: spending a decade putting self-service and replenishment tech into stores, and another decade redesigning the operating models and governance around it. The second part was always harder.
A cross-functional initiative has costs that land in one place and benefits that land everywhere, meaning that no one function can value its share. The organisation is not designed, incentivised or given the objectives to achieve enterprise-wide outcomes. And it isn’t only the organisation. Proposing the cross-functional version means more risk, a longer timeline and a harder business case than proposing the version that fits inside one function. And the risk is often individually personal, not just organisational.
This makes this a leadership level debate rather than a decision about a technology programme. Treat this technology era as a solver of existing problems, which it is and will be, and you get continuous improvement and the small gains that come with it. The compounding goes to the retailers who read this moment as a chance to reinvent.
This means building the conditions, incentives, structures, governance and skills that let an organisation capitalise on and shape whatever this era brings. It will take leadership, strategic clarity and some bravery, though less of the last if you have the first two.
So before anyone writes a business case, there are three questions worth asking of any technology initiative. Who is rewarded for the whole of the customer journey rather than a leg of it? Whose budget captures the return? And who sponsors it across the organisation rather than within a department? If the answers aren’t clear, that’s a signal to pause. It’s a design to revisit, and conversation to have before you choose a platform.
In 1974 the barcode looked like a way to speed up the checkout. The retailers who saw it as something larger, an opportunity to reimagine, rebuilt around it, and spent years compounding the advantage. None of them planned the industry that resulted: it arrived as a long run of separate decisions. Nobody in 1974 knew Clubcard was coming. The difference this time is that we know change is coming and we know the fundamentals of what that change will require. Preparing for it can be deliberate, rather than something that happens to you.
Matthew Rathbone is a Retail Technology Strategy Consultant who joined Equal Experts in 2025 after 20 years in retail and FMCG, including Cadbury, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s. Matthew specialises in establishing and leading major technology-enabled, operational change programmes, building the governance, strategy, and stakeholder engagement needed to deliver lasting value.
Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn.
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