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
