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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Your standard UPC-A bar code, the 12-digit one you’ll find on most products in the United States and ~~Europe~~ Canada, is made up of three parts. The first half of the code is the manufacturer code, and the second half (minus the last number) is the product code. The last number is a check digit that’s used to ensure the bar code scanned correctly.
So, with the first half being the manufacturer code, that means that there are 1,000,000 possible manufacturers that can have their own codes assigned to them (provided 000000 is a valid code), and then they all get 100,000 individual manufactured products to assign codes to. That’s a *lot* of codes.
That being said, we *are* running out as the world gets bigger and economies grow, which is why there are different *types* of bar codes. Different types of products get different types of codes, and we’re slowly but surely moving on to QR and Data Matrix codes, both of which can be as big as they need to be in order to carry the required information and aren’t limited to a certain number of characters. Advancements in data storage (especially in the cloud) have made this possible.
In order to prevent confusion, there’s an international standards body that is actually responsible for assigning codes to manufacturers and products. This minimizes the chance of overlap and allows for reassigning codes that were issued in the past but have fallen out of use because the manufacturer ceased to exist 20 years ago or so.
Edit: Canada, not Europe. Europe uses EAN-13, which is the same code but with a 13th digit added for country code. The US and Canada have a country code of 0 which isn’t printed, and scanners manufactured after of 2005 for the US and Canada can read both codes just fine.
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