Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector

Emek Basker

NBER Working Paper No. 17825
Issued in February 2012
NBER Program(s):Industrial Organization, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Barcodes and barcode scanners transformed the grocery industry in the 1970s. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner installations, to estimate scanners' effect on labor productivity. I find that early scanners increased a store's labor productivity, on average, by approximately 4.5 percent in the first few years. The effect was larger in stores carrying more packaged products, consistent with the presence of network externalities. Short-run gains were small relative to fixed costs, suggesting that the impediment to widespread adoption of the new technology was profitability, not coordination problems.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w17825

Published:

• Emek Basker, 2012. "Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(3), pages 1-27, July. citation courtesy of
• Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector, Emek Basker. in Standards, Patents and Innovations, Simcoe, Agrawal, and Graham. 2014