CINCINNATI — Every time you scan an item at the grocery store, you can thank a Cincinnati man for helping to get bar codes on almost everything we buy.

Barry Franz grew up in Linwood and graduated from Withrow High School before attending MIT. After college, he came back home to help usher in the computer age at Procter & Gamble.

"A lot of large-scale use of computers in inventory control," Franz said.

Before bar codes, inventory was done store by store, aisle by aisle, by hand.

Meet the Cincinnati man who helped create bar codes, revolutionized grocery shopping

"They run around with a little gadget that had ... it fed out little tabs that stuck to every product, and that was the price," Franz said. "So every product in the store had to be price-marked."

Grocers like Kroger wanted un

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