Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver invented the barcode by adapting Morse code's thin and thick lines. Grocery stores standardized it in the 1970s to solve inventory chaos. Today GS1, a nonprofit, makes $81 million a year selling barcodes, essentially lines of code, at massive markups.
Here's a product that is used, I believe, 6 billion times a day. It's a barcode invented by these two guys, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver. And these guys are inspired by Morse code with thin lines and thick lines. We can create like an infinite number of unique tags for something. At the same time, in another part of the world, you get the invention of the laser. Really great way to scan something. And then in the third part of the world, grocery stores are having a really tough time. They're sort of by hand keeping track of all the inventory they have. There's so many units, it's taking so many hours of labor, it's so slow. So they create the Ad Hoc Committee for the Uniform Grocery Product Identification Code, and they come together and they create the barcode and they change the shape of it. They change it to the rectangular shape that we all know and love today. And there became what's known today as GS1. GS1 is the nonprofit that issues these barcodes. You now need to use their system. Which means they have infinite pricing leverage, and they charge a shit ton for these barcodes. Last year, $81 million in revenue. A set of lines that they're selling for $90 million a year.
