Month: October 2025

Puerto Rico holds my earliest memories.  As the children of Chinese immigrants, we grew up speaking Cantonese at home.  The front of our home in Rio Piedras hosted my father’s restaurant.  Unfortunately, we didn’t learn Spanish at home, save for a few moments of talking to the patrons at the restaurant.  By the time we enrolled in school, we needed to learn a new language.  Initially, we didn’t realize that the words we knew for trivial things like ‘shoe’ were different.

I believe that my parents enrolled me in school a year early.  I’m not sure if they wanted to give me a head start or simply wanted me out of their hair during the day.  I’m pretty sure that I failed that class and needed to repeat.  No harm, though; I landed in the class where my classmates were mostly my age.  While I could speak the language, I was still the only Chinese student in my modestly sized class.

Continue reading “See who I am” →

Let’s discuss the typical check-out line.  Let’s walk backwards in time through technology.  First, Amazon Go had aspirations to do “Just Walk Out” checkout, though it doesn’t seem to work reliably enough.  Second, many stores have transitioned to having a portion of their stations as self-checkout; you may scan (and bag) your own items and pay.  Next, they introduced the fast “X items or fewer” checkout lines, so that patrons with fewer items don’t need to wait for someone with a full cart.  Finally, they added UPC (bar code) readers; before that, each item had a sticker with a number, and cashiers needed to enter them (much like produce today) meticulously.

We developed all this technology (bar code and RFID readers) to optimize.  We reconfigured lines and checkout equipment to streamline.  Employers meticulously agonize over how many employees to have per shift.  All this to minimize one thing:  the amount of time you spend waiting in line.  We want to think that a few minutes ultimately don’t matter that much.  However, we have all waited in the “10 items or fewer” lines and counted the items in the cart in front of us.  You might as well admit it.

Continue reading “To do it “the right way”.” →