What was the first product scanned with a barcode in a store, in 1974?

Answer

It was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

Context

At 8 a.m. on 26 June 1974, a cashier at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a multipack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum, the first item with a Universal Product Code to be scanned at a checkout. Marsh's head of research, Clyde Dawson, picked the gum partly to prove that a code could fit on a small package. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds an early supermarket scanner from this era.

The idea dates to 1949, when inventor Joe Woodland, working with Bernard Silver, drew on Morse code and sketched lines in the sand on a Miami Beach. They patented a circular 'bull's-eye' code in 1952, but at the time there was no cheap laser or computer to read it. In 1973 a grocery-industry committee chose IBM engineer George Laurer's rectangular design as the Universal Product Code, a choice that reportedly beat the bull's-eye proposed by RCA.

Adoption was slow. Retailers had to buy scanners, manufacturers had to print codes on packages, and shoppers worried that prices would no longer appear on each item. The use of barcodes grew more quickly in the 1980s after large retailers such as Kmart adopted them. A UPC does not hold a price: it identifies the product, and a store's computer looks up the price.

Sources differ about small details, for example whether the gum was a 10-pack, so the pack's size is best treated as approximate. The key fact, that a pack of Wrigley's gum was first, is consistent across the Smithsonian and GS1 US accounts.