Welcome everybody to episode number 119 of Underserved.

Joining me today is Dustin Humphreys, SVP of Digital and E-commerce at Rite Aid.

Let's get started.

Welcome to this week's edition of Underserved, the podcast for the rest of the tech industry,

where we focus on stories of tech industry leaders,

their insights, and their lessons learned. And now, your host, Andrew Jalina.

Dustin, thank you so much for joining us today on Underserved. Thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here.

So you grew up in Level Land, Texas, where the land was quite level. What was it like there? Yes, Andrew,

level land is a self-describing name. It's a very flat space. I don't know if people are familiar

with Texas, but it's in the area of Texas that sort of sticks up straight, kind of close to Oklahoma.

Yeah, that's where I grew up and great people in Level Land, maybe not the most tech forward place.

You still had some computer classes in high school, right?

We did. And, you know, I quickly was enamored by our PC lab, and we took a class. We had had some basic programming and now as I think about it, we maybe had some Pascal programming that we did in there. I was really taken by it. You know, and I thought this was the coolest thing ever and probably stemmed some from my fascination with gaming, the old video arcades. I was very interested in that as a young

kid and the PC computer just seemed like, you know, a way to extend that into something that

I didn't fully understand. I was just drawn to it. What were your favorite arcade games growing up?

You know, the classics like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dragon's Lair, if anybody

remembers that game. I had to actually ride my bicycle to like a local arcade and next to that

arcade was a grocery store. People, you know, of my generation, Gen X might remember when

you used to take glass bottles like Coca-Cola bottles or something where you could take

those back to the store and get like a deposit back. And my parents had accumulated a bunch of these in

the garage. Like they had just, I mean, stacks of them. I didn't have money to go to the arcade.

So I would load up my bicycle with as many as I could carry on either side of my handlebars or ride

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