• April 12, 1976
• Vol. 5
• No. 14

What That Symbol on the Cover Is

That curious array of rectangular bars and numbers on our cover this week—which will appear from now on— is called the Universal Product Code. It is used in the automated checkout systems that supermarkets are installing in this country. In a typical system, a laser beam scans the symbol and sends information to a computer which is programmed to ring up the correct price automatically. The system is designed to speed service and increase supermarket productivity.

The UPC symbol already appear on thousands of grocery and personal-care products on sale in supermarkets. It is being printed on our cover because 60 percent of the copies of PEOPLE sold every week are bought in grocery outlets, most of them supermarkets. A few monthly magazines now carry the UPC symbol; we expect additional magazines to follow suit. In every other way, PEOPLE's cover will remain the same: the familiar name, the date, the price, an appetite-whetting partial list stories inside, the big color picture of an interesting personality— take Audre Hepburn, for example— we think you'll want to read about.