Newsrooms and bars are like twin brothers. You pick any newspaper, and there is always THE watering hole for it, usually the very nearest one.
For the Baltimore Sun, that was the "Midtown Yacht Club" and the joke was in its name, in that it was nowhere near the water. Anyhow, about a decade or so, the guy owning it decides to sell the bar and finds a buyer quickly. He starts liquidating some of the non-related assets and then finds a ream of papers in the basement he had forgotten about.
The managing editor, who was helping him close the bar that night (though not in a working capacity) asks him about the ream. Turns out, it was a block of UPC barcodes the barowner had purchased a decade prior, as a sort of investment, and forgotten about.
When he bought them, they were a moment's whim to a pushy salesman, and a few pennies. By the time he was selling the bar, the UPC barcode ecosystem had gone through a huge growth and the allocated numbers were used up. Prices and renewals shot up through the roof to where it was prohibitively expensive to add new products to the market. And he was sitting on a whole block of addresses.
He ended up selling that contiguous barcode block for far more than the bar was worth, and retired.
The first ever product sold at a retail checkout using a UPC barcode is on display at the Smithsonian!
A 10 pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum.
The first UPC marked item ever scanned at a retail checkout was at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio at 8:01 a.m. on June 26, 1974, and was a 10-pack (50 sticks) of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum.[6] The shopper was Clyde Dawson and cashier Sharon Buchanan made the first UPC scan. The NCR cash register rang up 67 cents.[7] The entire shopping cart also had barcoded items in it, but the gum was the first one picked up. This item went on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.[8]
Yep, the gathering place for the Sacramento Bee when I was there was Benny's/Q Street Bar, even though the Press Club was just about 100 feet further down the street
For the Baltimore Sun, that was the "Midtown Yacht Club" and the joke was in its name, in that it was nowhere near the water. Anyhow, about a decade or so, the guy owning it decides to sell the bar and finds a buyer quickly. He starts liquidating some of the non-related assets and then finds a ream of papers in the basement he had forgotten about.
The managing editor, who was helping him close the bar that night (though not in a working capacity) asks him about the ream. Turns out, it was a block of UPC barcodes the barowner had purchased a decade prior, as a sort of investment, and forgotten about.
When he bought them, they were a moment's whim to a pushy salesman, and a few pennies. By the time he was selling the bar, the UPC barcode ecosystem had gone through a huge growth and the allocated numbers were used up. Prices and renewals shot up through the roof to where it was prohibitively expensive to add new products to the market. And he was sitting on a whole block of addresses.
He ended up selling that contiguous barcode block for far more than the bar was worth, and retired.