Surfing Amazon is a little bit like crystal ball glazing: you learn about products you might be interested in and about other customers’ preferences und purchases. Yet, it is not a crystal ball that marketing directors look through, but the “glass consumer” made transparent by today’s information and communication technologies. This new era of market transparency was heralded by the development and implementation of the scanning technologies (barcodes, scanner cash registers) in (food) retailing in the 1970s. For the first time ever, retailers had exact records of sales by product groups and articles because the barcode was printed on every single item and could automatically be captured by scanners.

In my paper I will address the role of retailers’ consumer profiles in shaping the scanning technology and the knowledge that retailers gained about consumers’ needs, preferences and life-styles by means of scanning. How did consumer needs and representations influence its development and diffusion? How did retailers gain knowledge about (their) customers and how can this expertise be characterised? Moreover, how did this knowledge retroact on distribution and consumption? To answer these questions, I focus on the adoption and diffusion of scanning in food retailing in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s as German food retailers played a pivotal role in the development and implementation of the European Article Number EAN, the bar-coding standard of the European consumer goods industry. In contrast to Richard Huisinga who approached the issue from a theoretical perspective, I will present empirical findings based on analyses of retail and consumer journals and, in particular, grey literature which I have found in private archives of the EHI Retail Institute and GS1 Germany - the former Centrale für Coorgansiation CCG that was responsible for the development and allocation of the EAN in Germany (reports, (consumer) studies, correspondence, records of the CCG supervisory board etc.). I assume that consumer profiles influenced the strategic conception of scanning. Moreover, I argue that because of scanner data and scanner retail panels, retailers not only gained knowledge in order to adapt their assortments, but also acquired expertise of their customers’ consumption behaviour and life-styles which strongly modified their mediation function.