I've been wondering for a while when they're going to put a date code on these cans of paint which can be read by the consumers: Us
I wondered that, too, until I was the engineer building a machine that included putting date-codes and barcodes onto finished products. It turns out, the date code is coded and standardized so machines can read it: only those manufacturers who decide on purpose to make it visible to the public in text bother to add more printer capability to their machines (expensive at best, and only available since about 2008!). In the beginning (1990-ish) the scanners could only read bars and spaces, which brought us the common 'scan code' you see on all products now. A scanner that can also read text characters is about 10x more expensive than a barcode reader, so the scenario continues...