A Fine Ending To A Broadcast Career

[Glen Livingstone]

A friend sent along this story from the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Happy reading!

Pluto

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What's Next for Mr. Next by Blake Eskin

In 2003, Ian Parker wrote a Talk of the Town story about Bill Jones, the line director at Whole Foods in Chelsea. Here Jones checks out the machine that has replaced him.

For two and a half years, Bill Jones worked as the chief line director of Whole Foods Market on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea. With his booming voice and disarming enthusiasm, Jones, a retired radio and television announcer from Sturgis, Michigan, turned the monotonous task of shepherding shoppers from three parallel queues to twenty-four cash registers into a command performance. His trademark calls of "Seven is ready!" and "Twelve is yours!" won him dinner invitations, marriage proposals, and an outpouring of good will that spilled over to benefit the Chelsea store, which was the natural-grocery chain's beachhead in Manhattan.

In February, 2004, a Whole Foods opened in the Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, and the company offered Jones a healthy raise and transferred him and his sonorous baritone uptown. The Columbus Circle store boasts almost twice as many checkout counters as in Chelsea, but Jones isn't line-directing-the cashiers there take turns. Instead, five days a week, he stands at the base of the escalator that leads into the subterranean supermarket, to greet customers and offer directions. "When they come off that escalator, their mind is someplace else," Jones says. "What I was doing in Chelsea was much more fun."

Chelsea wasn't having as much fun, either. By all accounts, the "team members" (as Whole Foods calls its employees) who stepped forward to direct the line ran a brisk operation. Occasionally, however, a Chelsea shopper would venture uptown and beg Jones to return. "It's very hard for me to be everywhere," Jones says.

It has got easier. This summer, a plasma screen was suspended from a beam in the ceiling at the Chelsea store, above the place where Jones once stood. The display on the screen is split into three bands of color-pink, green, and orange, like a half-gallon brick of sherbet-that correspond to the three lines where customers wait. Each cashier, after ringing up and bagging an order, pushes a button that sends a wireless signal to the screen. The register number slides down one of the three stripes and a familiar voice says, "Register seven . . . Register sixteen . . . Register three."

The voice, to be honest, could sound more familiar. The digital recording of Jones lacks depth, especially in the bass tones, and the computerized system pares down his vocabulary to the essentials. "No 'is ready' and 'is yours'-we just went with 'register,' " Jones explained during a visit to Chelsea to watch the new system in action. During a three-hour session at the home studio of an assistant produce buyer whom Whole Foods hired to make the recordings, Jones tried more than thirty versions of the word "register" and three variations on each number. (If the system works in Chelsea, screens may appear in other urban stores, so Jones recorded numbers up through seventy-five.) The computer cycles through these different versions randomly to sound more lifelike, but, even so, Jones's delivery feels mechanical. "I wish I could have put more into it, but the management told me to back off," he said. Still, Jones added, "It makes me feel kind of glad that some part of me is still here."

"This is probably more effective," Jones said as he stood off to the side, by the windows, observing the Chelsea lines. "I think sometimes I was probably distracted. And it's hard to see down all the way to the end. If I didn't see it, one nanosecond after the light went on a customer would say, 'Nineteen is ready, Bill!' "

It was just after noon, the beginning of the lunchtime rush. Jones had positioned himself out of the way of the flow of foot traffic in the store, but former colleagues came over to pay respects as if he were a visiting dignitary. One shopper asked Jones about the price tag on a sixteen-ounce smoothie. Others smiled and waved as they passed by. A short older woman named Jonnie Kuchwara gave him a hug. She lives a block away from the store and has shopped there almost every day since it opened, in 2001.

With a container of brown-rice sushi and a packet of crackers, Kuchwara reached the front of the orange line. "Register three," Jones's disembodied voice said, and the number three dropped into the orange rectangle. Kuchwara moved forward, but a skinny young woman wearing sunglasses appeared from out of nowhere and beat her to the register.

Kuchwara looked around. The cashiers were busy, and Jones was too far away. She did not look up at the screen. "You know what, I'm just going to stand in the line again," she said. "It's not too long."

[Cliff Bashly Kinkade]

You see kids, THAT'S HOW YOU CUT AND PASTE!

Find something obscure that people might miss, and present it to them in a way that makes life easier.

Oh and it also HELPS IF IT HAPPENS TO BE INTERESTING!

Nice find Pluto.