On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum using something novel — the black and white stripes of a universal bar code. The ...

What's black and white and read all over? Bar codes that can tell us who manufactured a product and where it's been — except when it comes to the financial services industry. Here, financial firms and ...