Every Saturday I hit the grocery store. And every Saturday, I choose the same checkout lane. Her name's Linda. She's slow—like, genuinely the slowest bagger there. She's also one of the nicest humans.
She asks about my week. Remembers what I bought last time. Tells me about her grandkids. Always has a compliment ready. And she gives me real talk on the food—not corporate euphemisms or robotic marketing speak. "Don't get those tomatoes, they've been sitting there all week." "The store brand chocolate is actually pretty good." She's not upselling me. She's just being honest.
And when something doesn't scan? She looks at me sly, lowers her voice, and says, "Looks like this one's gonna be free-99." By the time my bags are packed, I've had an actual human moment in a place designed to get me in and out as fast as possible.
I bet her manager hates it. Slow is easy to measure. And somewhere there's a spreadsheet that says Linda is the slowest bagger there. Some metric she's dragging down. Some KPI that flags her as a problem. But that spreadsheet doesn't know that I drive past two other grocery stores to get to this one. There's no KPI for that.
Then there's Peter.
Peter runs my local UPS Store. I pay about 20% more to ship through him instead of dropping packages off somewhere else. On paper, that's a bad deal. In reality, it's the best money I spend.
Peter knows me. Knows my family. Knows our story.
Years ago, my wife and I were long distance. She was a public school teacher in rural Mexico. I was in the States. We made it work the way people make it work—phone calls, visits when we could, and boxes. Lots of boxes. Pencils, notebooks, crayons, school supplies for her classroom. I'd pack them up and bring them to Peter.
Shipping to rural Mexico is a nightmare. Packages get lost. Customs holds things for weeks. Tracking numbers become meaningless. And when things went wrong—and they always went wrong—Peter would get on the phone with UPS corporate. He had the inside contacts. He'd dig until he found answers. He'd call me back with updates.
That wasn't in his job description. Nobody asked him to do that. But he did.
Once, a package got stuck in limbo. Some bureaucratic mess that wasn't my fault and wasn't his fault and wasn't really anyone's fault. Peter paid the shipping out of his own pocket to get it moving again. Just did it. Didn't make a big deal about it.
Yes, I could ship cheaper somewhere else. But cheaper isn't better. Cheaper is just cheaper. Whenever I have to ship a package, guess who I call?
There's an Ace Hardware in my town. You walk in, and it smells like sawdust and WD-40 and something vaguely metallic. The aisles are narrow. The inventory system appears to be "Earl knows where everything is."
A few months ago, my kid's crib was missing some screws. I had no idea what size they were. Didn't know the thread count. Didn't know if they were metric. I just grabbed one of the remaining screws and brought it in.
I showed it to Earl. "I need two more like this."
He rolled it between his fingers for about three seconds. Felt the threads. Held it up to the light. Then he walked to a drawer, pulled out two identical screws, and handed them to me. No app. No measurements. No calipers. Thirty years of touching screws had taught him something that no database could replicate.
A Home Depot opened up ten minutes away. It's got everything. Wider aisles. Better prices. An app that tells you exactly which shelf your item is on. By every metric that matters to a business school case study, it's the superior option.
The Ace Hardware is still there. Still busy.
Home Depot has an app. Ace has Earl. Guess which one I trust with my kid's crib?
I think about this a lot. We've gotten incredibly good at measuring the wrong things—shaving off seconds, eliminating friction, removing the human from the loop. And we've called it progress.
But here's what the optimizing misses: life isn't lived in the average case. Systems are great at the average case. They can handle a million transactions without breaking a sweat, faster and cheaper than any human ever could. Life, though, is lived in the exceptions. The package that gets stuck in customs. The crib screw you can't identify. The Saturday morning when you just need someone to ask about your week.
Systems don't know what to do with exceptions. They escalate them. Route them to a queue. Generate a ticket number and promise someone will be in touch within 24 to 48 business hours. Linda knows what to do with exceptions. So does Peter. So does Earl. You can bribe me into a transaction. You can't bribe me into caring—and the exceptions are where the caring shows.
By every metric that matters to a business school case study, my behavior doesn't make sense. I drive past two grocery stores. I pay 20% more for shipping. I trust a man who identifies screws by feel. I wait in the slow lane on purpose.
Somewhere, a professor is drawing a red X through my decisions. He can have the efficiency. I'll keep Linda, and Peter, and Earl.