Then he simply says that this is a statement about the commercialization of our society. To be honest, that would be a better explanation than "It's an Oreo's barcode".
I remember reading on Reddit, that in some salon the hated the barcode on the neck tattoo. So they had a cut out barcode from a box of tampons, and whenever somebody asked for that tattoo, that's what they did.
This was my immediate thought too but now they have weighted checkout counters and cameras checking items, but it definitely would have been great in the early days when I used to scan everything up as unwashed potatos
They just read the dark lines for a few bits of data (it's literally just a number). If you're pale enough and the tat done well enough, it should work, assuming the UPC is in the system for the POS scanning it.
555 95472, or 5 for short, was boy close in age to Charlie Brown. 5 had brown spiky hair, and he wore an orange shirt with the number 5 on it. 5 also played for Charlie Brown's baseball team. 5 was given a numerical name by his father, who was upset over the preponderance of numbers in people's lives; when questioned, 5 clarified that this was not his father's way of protesting, it was his way of "giving in." 5's family are named 1 (father), 2 (mother), 3 & 4 (twin sisters). and 6 (sister). His last name, 95472 (the accent is on the 4), was taken from the family's ZIP code; it is also the zip code for Sebastopol, California, where Schulz lived at the time.
Edit: I'm having a fun time imagining a brand manager at Mondelez looking at this pitch:
"So it's a consumer that has a tattoo of the barcode and is scanning it? At like a Ralphs? Oh, no, a Home Depot? Ok great. And we can clearly see that it's the brand with like a nice image of the product? No - it's grainy and text only and can barely be read? Perfect - green light. Great work guys. Let the creative agency know to keep more of this coming. Also, let's have the media agency seed this into some insignificant social media networks that almost no one is on. I can't wait to see the sales lift this is going to bring. I can smell a promotion."
"Also, can you make like 700-800 totally unrelated posts and spend a ton of time fawning over star trek first? THEN, when they're least expecting it, we hit em with this masterpiece."