Kenny Malone

It's true.

Yes.

It's true.

And I guess we should say that that kind of excellent sports coverage is the kind of thing that the Washington Post has just decided to eliminate almost entirely.

But yes, our first Valentine to Jesse Dougherty, his story, Between the Sheets, the College Excel Championships, It's Extraordinary Work by Jesse.

Check out the article.

Check out his sub stack, which we will link to in the show notes.

And thank you, Jess Jang.

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.