For decades, the tiny symbol has been the plumbing of global capitalism. It might finally be replaced.

To marvel at the choice and convenience of modern shopping, go visit your grocery-store mustard aisle. My local Whole Foods sells more than 20 different kinds: basic yellow mustard and Grey Poupon, yes, but also “spicy brown mustard” and “banana-pepper mustard” and “no-sugar-added honey mustard” and “organic salt-free mustard.” There is “uniquely sharp mustard”(!), and “sulfite-free original Dijon mustard squeeze”(!?).

Such dizzying choices are made possible by an amazing piece of technology: the barcode. These black-and-white lines are machine-speak for an item’s Universal Product Code, which allows a scanner to tell you exactly what the item is, and draw up its price in any given store. The barcode is why a cashier can quickly scan your stuff, shove it into a bag, and hand you a receipt (and how self-checkout kiosks are able to make you do all the work). And because the barcode allows for incredible efficiency in tracking and managing inventory, it is a large part of why grocery stores now have a paralyzing number of options. Around the time the barcode debuted, in 1974, supermarkets stocked an average of 9,000 products. Today, you will find more than 30,000.

In this half century, the barcode has become the plumbing of global capitalism—revolutionary, pervasive, forgettable. More kinds of scannable codes have arrived since the ’70s, but the linear UPC barcode is on the packaging of most consumer products you get from every store, grocery or otherwise, brick-and-mortar or online. It is among the greatest, most consequential inventions in American history. How did we get stadium-size supermarkets, Costcos, and Amazon? “The barcode has to be there at the beginning,” Timothy Simcoe, an economist at Boston University who has studied the technology, told me. Barcodes are on books, TVs, wine bottles, spatulas, and underwear. There are barcode tattoos, barcode conspiracy theories, barcode presidential scandals, and buildings on four continents designed to resemble barcodes.

Basically nothing about the symbol itself has changed in 50 years. Look at the first barcode, from a 67-cent pack of Wrigley’s gum: It doesn’t seem outdated, because it isn’t outdated. Scanners have gotten cheaper and better, but the barcode is still the barcode is still the barcode. At least, it is for now. After all this time, the barcode’s success in building an America that crams its stores and warehouses with an ever-expanding pile of stuff might finally be its own undoing.

If the sound of the barcode era is beep, the sound of the era that preceded it was click. Every product once needed a literal sticker price, which was stamped into place. “In those days, we were kind of like Western gunmen,” Norman Mayne, the CEO of Ohio’s Dorothy Lane Market since 1967, told me. “We had our price stamper on our hip as if that was our six-shooter.” Without a code to scan, a hardware store would have to manually log every single wrench, paint can, and tape measure coming and leaving through its doors. A bookstore might not have an up-to-date sense of which titles were selling and which weren’t. Grocery stores had it especially rough; the checkout counter often turned into a traffic jam. A cashier adept at swiftly keying in prices was so valued that, in 1964, the winner of the International Checker of the Year Award was given a trip to Hawaii and a mink stole.

In the early 1970s, grocery execs came together to figure out a better way. First, they conceived of a standard 12-digit Universal Product Code tied to every product, sort of like a phone number that would ring........

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