Kenny Malone

We begin this next Valentine with a quote from Forbes magazine.

Quote, I can't wait to use that self-checkout machine, said no one ever.

Retail stores have increasingly scaled down on hiring and paying human beings to scan our purchases and instead are forcing us to do it as customers, slowly with constant machine problems that require an overworked human to come over and scan some card.

Anyway, Forbes describes an exception to this, though.

The clothing store Uniqlo.

Uniqlo?

Uniqlo has developed a cult following for its self-checkout.

Quote, you just toss all the apparel you're buying into the self-checkout machine's container bin and miraculously, all of your items are automatically scanned.

Apparently this is because each item has a little radio transponder.

Anyway, that is the background you need to know for this next Valentine.

Our own Alexei Horowitz-Gazi was walking through New York with a friend, remembered how much he loved Uniqlo's self-checkout and hated other self-checkouts,

and recorded this audio Valentine on his phone.

Alexei Horowitz-Gazi there, who did ask me to clarify that he is, quote, not some sociopath who wants all humans replaced by machines.

It's more like, if there has to be self-checkout, you know, here's one that doesn't create more of a mess at the checkout.

That's his point.

And I will add that Alexei's Valentine did prompt a whole lot of frantic research for some of us at Planet Money, wondering...

why isn't every self-checkout this good?

And why isn't my grocery store this good?

And is Alexi paying extra for his Uniqlo turtleneck because of this?

And the answer seems to be that each item at Uniqlo, you know, it has this little RFID chip, a tiny little radio transponder.