When I was a kid, it was a common sight to see people in the supermarket with machines applying price labels to stuff. Nowadays this is something really rare, and only happens when food products are about to run out and are discounted. Still, sometimes, you see a product that has been re-labelled.

Sometimes the new label contains the same barcode, but additional information that is not present on the original packing, this is often the case in pharmacies in Switzerland. Another reason can be that the labels are incorrect, or incomplete, the official price has changed or some other legal changes. And sometimes, it is really hard to know what went on.

I needed a new sleeve for my swiss army knife, so I bought a new one at transa. The sleeve comes in a plastic wrapping, with a perfectly valid barcode, 07611640194054 which is assigned to:

Still another label was added with a restricted use code: 2000003332137. The label also contains some additional information: size, colour, weight and another number, 078577-006001 which is not encoded in the barcode. Why change the barcode? One possible reason is that there are variations of the product sharing the same manufacturer provided code and they wish to distinguish them in their system. Another possible reason is that the product originally did not bear a barcode, and the store assigned it a restricted use one so that their system could work, and the product got a manufacturer provided number later. Compatibility…