Bucklin, Randolph E., and Sunil Gupta. "Commercial Use of UPC Scanner Data: Industry and Academic Perspectives." Marketing Science 18, no. 3 (1999): 247–273.

“UPC bar codes offer another way for our users ... There are a few points that make this announcement different: 1. ScanLife can already scan 2D codes, so now this is truly an all-in-one ...

As a result, the scanning of the first UPC barcode received little attention at the time. A few newspapers published short articles about the launch event, but it wasn’t exactly front-page news.