Infrastructuring prices: from paper to digital price systems

Chapter 6 explores how cash registers and scales first, and later barcodes and related devices, contributed to build then transform the market infrastructure in grocery retailing. The appearance of barcodes and scanners in the 1970s was intended to further stabilize the link between products and prices, but also introduced a partial and ironic return to the original coded prices. The UPC-barcode was originally intended to provide a unique identifier for individual goods and, as such, its spread had a structuring influence on the upstream grocery markets. Barcode scanning, on the other hand, purported to improve the efficiency of retail operations by reducing the amount of work spent on price marking and by improving the precision and speed of checkouts. But the success and continued spread of barcodes to virtually every product sold in grocery stores meant that they could be appropriated for other uses, such as loyalty programs, tracking of purchasing behavior, consumer analytics, and targeted marketing.