

Ask HN: Barcodes, are they all stored in a central location? - havoc2005

Are barcodes/UPC codes that are placed on food items and grocery store products centrally managed by the store they are purchased from or are they all unique identifiers to a specific product carried by a specific store and maintained by a third party?
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chris_dcosta
As someone who has intimate knowledge of the second largest retailer in the
world, I can tell you it's a mixture.

Basically you have food and non-food items. Food items that are weighed in-
store for example can be given a barcode which starts with an in-store prefix,
other food items contained in tins have a barcode that the manufactures have
assigned following certain conventions (country of origin etc..) food created
in-house gets yet another barcode because it may be produced from tinned food
that is also sold on shelves. I could go on...

Non-food stuff tends to be packaged already and the barcodes are supplied by
the manufacturer sometimes conforming to the recognised format sometimes based
on their own product reference.

You can get software that generates a barcode depending on the information you
want to encode, and it'll do it according to the recognised standards, but
your data is your own.

The EAN Code is the most widely known code in Europe, but there are also Book
codes ISBN and periodical codes... OK enough already!

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duck
Via Google - [http://guides.wsj.com/small-business/starting-a-
business/how...](http://guides.wsj.com/small-business/starting-a-business/how-
to-get-upc-codes-for-your-products-2/)

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sukuriant
An easy way to find out the answer would be to go purchase one thing from
Store A and the same thing from Store B. You can rule out at least one
possibility from there :)

I'll give you a hint, though: you can scan a barcode with your phone and
compare prices :)

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havoc2005
Good advice. But where can I find out what company distributes the bar codes?

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sukuriant
You really should have google'd this.

A single search: "Who designates bar codes?" yielded this as the top result:
[http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080517170020AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080517170020AAeJt9s)

