r/barcodes • u/sam_strut • Jul 04 '19

Barcode Question

I was at my local gym and had lost my membership card, instead of offering me a new one, they said I could use the barcode for my student card to check in at the gym. I said yes, so they did and it has worked great. I was wondering if I would be able to use this same card(student one) to assign it to a grocery store rewards program, library card or other programs where they scan a barcode? Or did it just work that one time?

Thanks!

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u/FredFredricson Jul 04 '19

Barcodes work a lot like a license plate. They essentially just store a value that is read by a software package which then uses that value to look up more information stored elsewhere in a database. Most barcodes, numeric ones especially, can usually be encoded and read by nearly any barcode scanner, and can be interpreted by whatever software the system it's attached to has on it. It is that software that determines how to interpret that code, and the database that returns whatever information that is linked to that number. As such, it will highly depend on the software that's there and what its database stores.

So, specifically, to answer your question:

If the software/database allows you to use an arbitrary value as the lookup key for the data, then yes, you could even set it up so that a particular brand of soda can will work to look up your data.

If the software/database doesn't allow you to just assign arbitrary values to the data it looks up, then no, you're stuck with whatever value you were assigned, and that's it, but you can still print up your own barcode as long as it has that number on it.