Why isn’t it automatically calculated. It’s 2026. Surely we have metadata for products on lock by now. If the tag has the volume and the price, it has all the information it needs.
Having worked on POS software, I can guarantee you we do not have “metadata for products on lock”.
Manufacturers will sometimes reuse the same UPC even though the packaging is fairly different. The UPC doesn’t contain the price, size, or any size – it is just a convenient look up for whatever POS the retailer uses, and for systems targeting independent retailers, that might be maintained mostly manually, though some warehousing associations might provide an importable list.
In large retailers sometimes the smart tags are controlled using a system that doesn’t even deal with UPCs, just images / webpages, shelf locations, and schedules.
Yeah, and I realize that. It’s absurd that our capitalist society boasts about big data and technology and Roll Backs and Saving and all sorts of other things that might make you believe they care about such a fundamental part of it all.
I name drop the current year because as they years go on, it’s ever more absurd that something like this isn’t perfect yet.
Not just profit but lack of a central authority to enforce it. Standards are great when everyone follows them, but establishing standards is an absolute nightmare. Even the humble UPC is surprisingly sketchy when you dig into it and it’s amazing every manufacturer managed to mostly follows the standard. Now for extra fun, UPCs are deprecated and everyone is supposed to be swapping to QR codes instead. I can’t wait to see what a complete and utter clusterfuck that’s going to turn into.
Why isn’t it automatically calculated. It’s 2026. Surely we have metadata for products on lock by now. If the tag has the volume and the price, it has all the information it needs.
Having worked on POS software, I can guarantee you we do not have “metadata for products on lock”.
Manufacturers will sometimes reuse the same UPC even though the packaging is fairly different. The UPC doesn’t contain the price, size, or any size – it is just a convenient look up for whatever POS the retailer uses, and for systems targeting independent retailers, that might be maintained mostly manually, though some warehousing associations might provide an importable list.
In large retailers sometimes the smart tags are controlled using a system that doesn’t even deal with UPCs, just images / webpages, shelf locations, and schedules.
Buyer beware, indeed.
Yeah, and I realize that. It’s absurd that our capitalist society boasts about big data and technology and Roll Backs and Saving and all sorts of other things that might make you believe they care about such a fundamental part of it all.
I name drop the current year because as they years go on, it’s ever more absurd that something like this isn’t perfect yet.
But profit motive is why it isn’t perfect yet.
Not just profit but lack of a central authority to enforce it. Standards are great when everyone follows them, but establishing standards is an absolute nightmare. Even the humble UPC is surprisingly sketchy when you dig into it and it’s amazing every manufacturer managed to mostly follows the standard. Now for extra fun, UPCs are deprecated and everyone is supposed to be swapping to QR codes instead. I can’t wait to see what a complete and utter clusterfuck that’s going to turn into.