Don't put too much faith in Optical Character Readers as the cure. I spent the last 3 1/2 years prior to retiring working with OCRs. They are great machines but they are not foolproof. I have seen them mis-read clearly marked bar codes, sending them to the wrong bins repeatedly.
As far as manual counts, people are not as accurate as machines on extremely long counts nor are they as fast. There have been studies done on this subject. I don't know what they are but Skeptic does and I'm sure he will happily expound at great length on the subject when he returns from his camping trip with the Cub Scouts.
If he's still sane.

troll