Efficient queues
I am very petty. Stupid shit bugs me. Every time inside a Duane Reade (that’s a NY regional drug store, for those of you who live elsewhere. Think CVS, RiteAid, etc), and there is a crowd at the registers, I get really fucking annoyed. Why? One of the cashiers inevitably screams out, “Separate lines!” There would always be an undertone of indignation, as if the customers are too idiotic and purposefully want to screw up their jobs.
The thing is, separate lines is inefficient for the customers. It bugs me. At my local grocery store, I will skip a certain elderly cashier due to that person’s slow speed, even if that line is half as long as the next one. I always end up making it through faster at the longer line.
If you queue up the customers in a single line, and then funnel them to the open register, that helps the customer better. If you go B&H, which is this ginormous electronics store on 9th ave and 34th st, you see how they do it. That place is efficient.
Duane Reade, you suck.
Foodinmouth’s post makes an interesting point about queues.
An American friend in England once asked me about British queues (ok, legendary stuff, orderly queues of 1 and all that, we have heard it all before).
If people queue up in the order in which they came and not in front of specific cashiers based on how swiftly they estimate the queues will move, it is fairer and more efficient. This way of queuing allow them to go to the cashier that gets free next rather than one they chose to stick with based on their judgement of the queue.
Fairer because people get served in the order in which they came.
More efficient because they do not have to game one queue taking guesses at the cashier’s efficiency and basket loads of stuff people are buying, but because they can benefit from the overall efficiency of the system and not get penalised for choosing the wrong queue.
If you feel the other queue always moves faster, compare it with your experience in one-queue-only-served-as-cashiers-become-free places.
1 month ago