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When Alan Haberman came to San Francisco to upend the global economy—which in the end he did—he wasn’t seeking venture capitalists or software engineers. This was the early 1970s, when a computer in every home was still just Steve Jobs’ teenage dream. Anyway, Haberman wasn’t a geek. He was a grocer.
According to his New York Times obituary, this mid-level supermarket executive needed to convince some fellow respectable businessmen to follow his lead. Haberman wanted grocery stores to embrace the 12-digit Universal Product Code—better known as the barcode—to create a standardized system for tracking inventory and speeding checkout. He took his fellow execs to a nice dinner. Then, as was the fashion at the time, they went to see Deep Throat. And they liked Haberman’s idea, these guys with wide lapels who changed the business of how Americans bought food—a change that over the past 40 years has come to mean so much more.
