Receipt numerology

This blog's mission is to pay attention to overlooked phenomena. For example: parking spaces or lampposts. But today I will focus on the receipt. That piece of paper you throw away routinely.

These are constant:

• Store: 46 - they have 62 stores in The Netherlands
• Cash register: 60 - I didn't count the cash registers in the store
• Person number: 241307 - they have 11.000 employees now, did 200.000 people ever work at V&D? probably some different coding is used
• Date: 05/02/11

These are variable:

• Time: 13:35 - 13:40
• Receipt number: 4984 - 4989 - one customer per minute? - this store or all stores? V&D claim to serve 1.500.000 customers each week
• Big barcode number - transaction number? what coding is involved?
• 592053896189263656284778
• 592553896189263191284778

I see no trivial relationship between the data on the receipt and the barcode number and I don't have enough data (yet) for reverse engineering. Maybe 0-5 has something to do with receipt number? And there is some symmetry in 656-191.

I cannot I find a standard coding for this 24-digit number on the Internet. There is no simple modulo-11 check involved:

• Barcode A = 2* 3* 23* 337* 12730699182670271713
• Barcode B = 2* 7972667* 37161585714621167
• Barcode A mod 11 = 3
• Barcode B mod 11 = 0

More complex than I expected. I will have to collect more receipts.

See also:
Wikipedia - Receipt
Wikipedia - Barcode
Wikipedia - European Article Number