What happened is that Network (the largest magazine distributor) announced that magazine People Bagged was sent out to retailers with an incorrect barcode. How did it get through we are not told? Was it checked by Network before it was sent, probably not? Is there any check done by Network to confirm the barcode, once more we are not told? It would be nice if someone checked this out and got back to us about how it happened and whether anything is going to be done to make sure that something like this does not happen another time.
What is clear is that now it is more important with the growth of point of sale is the barcode quality is greater than ever and if this is what happens, then barcodes should be tested before shipping by distributors because it clearly can slip past the printer. When I made some enquires, I was told that the retailer could check it when it arrived. I thought to myself what thousands of retailers have to check the barcode when the same process could be done once in the suppliers' location? This does not make sense. Although I did admit that those of our clients that used, our in house barcode would have been fine.
What is clear is that no-one bothered to notify us even though if we had known about it, we could have sent a patch to automatically correct the error. Probably the largest pool of magazine retailers could have been fixed immediately. What very likely happened is that many of these magazines were incorrectly sold, which will muck up the sales history and would have caused some loss of good will by the customer and by the retailer when they were made aware of this mistake.
Okay it happened, is anyone going to do anything about it?
