10at10 Club

Main Discussion Area => In Memoriam, Happy Birthday => Topic started by: Wayback on June 24, 2011, 08:33:27 AM

Title: RIP Alan Haberman, helped put bar code everywhere, 81
Post by: Wayback on June 24, 2011, 08:33:27 AM

Alan Haberman's vision helped put the bar code everywhere.  He led the supermarket industry's committee that settled on the now-ubiquitous product code in 1973. An estimated 10 billion bar codes are now scanned daily around the world.  When asked to help modernize grocery-store technology in 1971, he was the chief executive of First National Stores, a New England supermarket chain.  The dozen members of his committee were "young, intense, brilliant."  To defuse tension during one three-day meeting, Haberman took them to a showing of the adult film "Deep Throat." 
He was motivated not by slim profit margins, he later said, but by the dismal state of the pre-automated checkout stand in the early 1970s.  It was "the least pleasant experience in a store because people hated having to wait in line!"  He was 81.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-alan-haberman-20110622,0,6706611.story