Kenny Malone
speaker
2,347 appearances
43 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 6d ago
Kenny Malone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 43 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 16.
Appearances
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.
And those have become cheaper and cheaper.
One McKinsey report says that RFID tags have come down from 20 cents about a decade ago to 4 cents a tag in recent years.
And yeah, I mean, if you sell clothes like Uniqlo, like what's an extra four cents to make your fancy self-checkout work?
Especially if Uniqlo doesn't have to pay a cashier and customers move through it faster.
But if you're a grocery store and you sell, you know, green peppers, an extra four cents on each pepper really cuts into the margin.
So I wouldn't count on seeing this Valentine's worthy technology at the grocery store anytime soon.
Meanwhile, back with my Valentine's Day co-pilot today and Betty Boop's stan, Jennifer Jenkins.
Showing 1681–1700 of 2,347 · page 85 of 118
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