Why Pricing Guns Stuck Around After The Barcode

Today in Tedium: Determining how much something costs shouldn’t be difficult, but in an ecosystem where everything is driven by highly personalized data, concerns are rising that prices might not be on stable ground. Recently, some states and regulators have started to scrutinize e-paper price tags out of a concern that those tags will enable pricing that adapts to demand—or worse, to the customer. A major union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), even announced plans to launch a campaign against electronic shelf labels, as they’re called. But what if I were to tell you that this concern is not in fact a new one, and it more or less played out like this 50 years ago, on a technology that most people take for granted today? That’s right, we’re talking about barcodes, along with its predecessor technology, the pricing gun. Today’s Tedium dives into the surprisingly long-running conflict between price tags and barcodes. — Ernie @ Tedium

200,000

The number of pricing guns that Sears used during a 1989 promotion that saw the company permanently lower prices at its stores throughout the United States. (The company also used 100 million pricing labels, which is about the amount, in dollars, that the retailer spent on the campaign.) The moment was big and showy, and involved the company closing its stores for 42 hours, with a single store having to mark down prices on about 1 million individual items.

The problem with looking for a stock photo of a pricing gun is that you get surrounded by images of guns that don’t shoot prices. (Martin Chung/Flickr)The pricing gun: Where the hell did it come from?<br>It turns out that searching for something called a “pricing gun” is kind of tough to do. As our search engines have declined, anything with the word “gun” on it is suspect, even if it’s for something fairly innocuous.<br>But the pricing gun is nonetheless an excellent example of a device that has helped millions of people identify shifting prices, yet is only truly used in one context: Retail. You can clearly see the roots of where it came from by taking separate, unrelated ideas and combining them. You can look at things like combination locks, typewriters, and rubber stamps, and see how they were combined in novel ways to produce an iconic piece of supermarket kit.<br>In many ways, the pricing gun, which at its root takes a sticker with self-stick adhesive, prints a price on it, and tags it on a product, is a synthesis of multiple ideas that, together, created something new. We talked about one, self-stick adhesive (terrible name upon its initial release BTW), six years ago. Great innovation by the adhesive giant now known as Avery Dennison, but not one that was designed to scale. Imagine putting a label on every single product in a grocery store, by hand, writing the prices out, cutting the stickers, and so on. It would be the definition of Tedium.<br>But there were other lanes for price labeling that were already starting to emerge. Consider the printing process, for example, which essentially involved pressing metal or rubberized content onto ink, then taking the ink-stained surface and pressing it onto a sheet of paper. These were once parts of giant machines, but they could also be made handheld or somewhat more portable. The first commercial typewriter, the Hansen Writing Ball, feels like it could’ve been used for price tags if put in a slightly different context. All of this fed into the idea of the handheld “rubber stamp,” which gradually gained a “self-inking” capability, which meant that you didn’t even need an inkwell to dip them in.<br>Meanwhile, innovations in the combination lock during the 1870s began to bleed to similar tools. If you make the numbers on a combination lock lean outward rather than inward, the wheels could be used not unlike a printing press. So you can see where this is going!<br>A combination lock that prints. How neat. (Google Patents)All of this led to the Bates Automatic Numbering Machine, a press-down device Edwin G. Bates patented around 1901. While intended for checks and similar documents, the approach is fairly similar to how a price tagger works. You set the number, you press down on the page, and then it goes to the next number for the next page. This device helped to reshape the legal industry in particular, as pages could now easily be numbered, and became known enough that “Bates numbering” became a common business-world shorthand. In fact, some later versions of the device could keep the same number for multiple stamps.<br>This was clearly the path that led to adjustable price tagging, though other inventors took the helm. At the turn of the 20th century, Frederick Kohnle of the Automatic Pin Ticketing Machine Company effectively brought this process to price tags of the kind that might be attached to clothing, rather than to stickers. (It wasn’t quite handheld, but you can see the DNA bleed...