Excerpts: Chances are 50-50 that your last food purchase at a supermarket was scanned to determine the price. You also received a detailed item description of your purchase and possibly coupons for future repeat or complementary purchases. At the same time, your purchase was providing valuable information to the supermarket. The manager can periodically check to see what items are selling, if a sales promotion is effective, which checker is busy, and for how long, and use other information that helps manage the store. The Universal Product Codes (UPC's) are perhaps the most important innovation for the retailing industry since shopping carts or computers. Retail food stores are now shifting from conventional checkout systems to scanning checkout systems. Since the Kroger Company first installed a scanning checkout system in a retail store in July 1972, over 15,000 food stores have added scanning at the point of sale.
