Like how is there no overlap of barcodes at all? There’s are millions if not, billions of items around the world that have unique barcodes. Are they differentiated per country or something?
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Many many years ago, when supermarkets first moved to barcodes and electronic scanning tills, I worked in EPOS for one of them. I got strangely obsessive about barcodes and even now, 30 years later I can still recall that the first two numbers of a EAN refer to the country (50 being UK, or it did do). The next five were the brand (which seemed to be based on marketing rather than who created it as 00192 was the code for Gateway/Somerfield where I worked). The next five were the unique code for the actual product with slight product amends having their own code (so 2litre Coke could have been 12345 whereas the one with 25% extra free could have been 12346). The last one was a check digit.
So I guess a EAN could cover up to 99,999 brands each with 99,999 individual items — which is quite a lot! Sure everything has changed in those 30 years though!
And even though I am now in my 50’s with very little memory, I can still remember all that which makes me proper sad I know!
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