We need to decentralize barcodes by treating product lookups as a URL, with metadata as query parameters. This way GS1 can operate much differently.
QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#32Aldi uses huge barcodes to speed up scanning [0]. I‘m not sure it would make sense to replace those with two-dimensional codes. [0] https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/why-are-aldi-barcodes-so...
Also, if for whatever reason, you can always enter a barcode by hand if the text-line is still readable (so like manualsearching for an EAN) while this is impossible by a QR code (too mich data to enter by hand).
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this not moving more responsability and work onto consumers rather than tackling the problem at the root. Coca-cola had a 2.7B EBTDA last quarter. Marketing needs to stop blowing smoke up people's rears. If they care about the environment, they can just use glass! Install mega watts of renewables to provide the power for glass recycling. Zero plastic in the environment. Companies need to stop externalizing the…
>they can just use glass Does anyone even recycle glass anymore? I know it used to be a thing but I think fresh plastic bottles probably cost less than even the collection and sorting costs for glass. I haven't seen any recycler ask for glass in ages. >Companies need to stop externalizing their costs into environmental problems and telling people it's their problem for buying it. They are just giving people what they…
My local transfer station has a large glass deposit the same size as its plastic one.
In Quebec you bring your glass bottles back for their deposit and at least for the beer bottles they are cleaned and reused many times.
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#34One of the ideas I was toying with a few years ago was a machine-readable nutrition label, but self-contained rather than involving a database lookup (there just aren't that many bits of entropy in a nutrition facts table, so it's practical to just encode it in a reasonable-size 2D barcode). I thought they could be useful for e.g. boxed lunches at a conference, or printed on a "mom and pop" restaurant menu, or in a c…
We have written language which can do all that with no technology at all.
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
After careful consideration I've decided that I'm more concerned with the waste and pollution caused by single-use plastics than I am the privacy rights of polyethylene bottles.
How is this not moving more responsability and work onto consumers rather than tackling the problem at the root. Coca-cola had a 2.7B EBTDA last quarter. Marketing needs to stop blowing smoke up people's rears. If they care about the environment, they can just use glass! Install mega watts of renewables to provide the power for glass recycling. Zero plastic in the environment. Companies need to stop externalizing the…
Refillable bottles and plastic are not incompatible. The bottles just need to be durable enough. They will still be lighter than glass which will save fuel used for transporting them.
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they can just use glass Does anyone even recycle glass anymore? I know it used to be a thing but I think fresh plastic bottles probably cost less than even the collection and sorting costs for glass. I haven't seen any recycler ask for glass in ages. >Companies need to stop externalizing their costs into environmental problems and telling people it's their problem for buying it. They are just giving people what they…
My local transfer station has a large glass deposit the same size as its plastic one. In Quebec you bring your glass bottles back for their deposit and at least for the beer bottles they are cleaned and reused many times.
I'm going to have to do more research. I can just say, I haven't seen glass welcome in recycle bins in a long time. It makes me wonder what changed, which types of recycling are subsidized, etc.
Many bottles in the US still say they are subject to a deposit of like 5 cents, but only in certain states. I've never lived anywhere that had an active bottle return program for glass.
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
My congratulations to all local entrepreneurs who are gearing up their printers to print "replacement" QR codes to put over the existing ones, once the 25-refill limit is reach.
You've got it backwards -- it's a 25-refill minimum, not limit. And what do entrepreneurs care? They send the bottles back to Coca-Cola regardless. The Coca-Cola truck comes, picks up crates of empty bottles and drops off crates of full bottles. From the way it's written, it sounds like it's a tool for Coca-Cola to track bottle usage, to separate bottles into separate streams for reuse and now-can-be-recycled.
Ah, I thought this was for customers to get free refills.
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually a consumer choice thing. Poor countries tend to sell Coke in glass bottles because it's cheaper to run a bottle deposit program and refill them than to sell plastic that just gets thrown away. But consumers don't want glass, it breaks and it's heavy; they want disposable plastic. In fact, for decades consumers have actually bought coke from stores in plastic bags with straws, and collect the bottle depo…
Plastic bags make sense when people are carrying all their groceries on foot from the store to their homes. If the same people had to put their groceries in a car to be jostled about, I bet they wouldn't like their liquids in bags that can leak and leave a mess in their expensive cars. I think a lot of people like glass, but I haven't seen a recycler want it in a long time. So is it more responsible to buy glass that…
> but I haven't seen a recycler want it
Perhaps that is a US problem, in Europe glass recycling is fairly Universal at all recycling centres and most neighbourhood streets have below ground waste containers for glass.
At least in my reality the issue is that Retailers have virtually eliminated glass alternatives from supermarket shelves. Other than beer/wine and some 1.5L juice bottles, pretty much everything else is plastic, even when the same product is also manufactured in glass, it simply does not exist in supermarket shelves.
You have to go to very large distribution centres to actual find glass alternatives for everyday products. So to me turning this into a consumer issue is naive.
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#39How much data can the code store? I doubt it will contain all of that information, but rather, a URL. Like the other post said, more tracking!
According to Wikipedia, the largest (version 40) QR code can hold up to 1852 bytes, though they are huge and difficult to scan. A more readable size is a version 10, which can encode up to 174 bytes with maximum error correction and no compression. This is plenty if a certian predefined binary structure is encoded into it and a device knows how to decode it
I know "The Scene" has 1K demo section, this 1,852 bytes could be interesting. An extra 852 bytes :)
Re: QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'
#40This is a confusing article. Doing price lookups based on barcode-encoded identifier scanned in at the point of sale doesn’t change radically if the encoded format is a UPC or a QR code. We’re probably getting close to the point where most retailers now have POS equipment that can handle QR codes, and manufacturers can consider leaving UPC codes off of their packaging. Outside of a point-of-sale context, you’ve alway…
I can see this being used for discounting fresh foods to reduce waste. Not bulk produce, but packaged produce, meat, bread, prepared foods.
Stores discount these things as they approach the end of their shelf life, which generally means spending labor to individually tag items with a substitute barcode. But labor costs money, and clerks get busy, things get missed, food gets wasted, and margins get degraded.
Currently the barcode on something like a steak encodes the PLU and the weight. If it also encoded the pack date, then this discounting can take place automatically with no chance of missing anything.