Kenny Malone

speaker

2,347 appearances 43 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 5d ago

Kenny Malone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 43 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 16.

Appearances

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Planet Money · The laws of the office revisited · 11 Mar 2026 podcast

No, no, no, no, no.

They were measuring our like items scanned per minute.

And then I believe they were posting those for the other cashiers to see.

Okay.

So I'm a little competitive.

I'm also a goody two shoes.

And I'm like, I gotta be faster.

I gotta be faster.

I gotta get my bosses these numbers.

And then...

I get this item that won't scan.

There wasn't a ton of cilantro in rural Pennsylvania.

I think it probably was like cat food.

Cat food was weirdly hard to scan.

The label got all torn up and crap.

Anyway, I'm trying to scan this thing and all I can think is like, oh my God, my items per minute is plummeting, plummeting.

And then finally I just let it go down the register, unscanned, and I grab the next item and I move on.

so you gave the cat food away for free yes technically i suppose we would have to say i stole the cat food but to be a good employee that's why you asked me to check the petty theft laws in pennsylvania i was just trying to be a good employee i was trying to get good numbers and i got good numbers my items per minute were i believe the best in the entire grocery store so okay but when your bosses said speed things up i'm sure that they didn't mean break the law in the process yes

Yes, and that is the point of this story.

I may have been breaking the normal law, but I have since learned that I was simply following a different law known as Goodhart's Law.

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