I agree. The article didn’t really reveal anything except that there is this field called queuing theory.
Interesting stuff was overlooked like how many balks (bolting from the line and abandoning any hope of being served) per thousand is acceptable, or the fact that a common calculation returns the average wait time at any given moment, regardless of when you asked for that answer last (in other words, if the average wait time in the queue is calculated to be 5 minutes, you can expect to wait 5 minutes regardless of how many minutes you have already waited).
I’m guilty of the same thing. The self-checkout is a major pain-in-the-ass.
Now…
I think that this is where things get interesting- that is, from a libertarian point of view.
Do you think that people aspire to be supermarket checkout clerks?
I say no.As a matter of fact, I doubt that you can find one checkout clerk that grew up dreaming of ringing up sales for a grocery store.
Technology is supposed to free us all from toil. Self-checkout technology is no different.
The fact that you and I hate using the self-checkout line is perpetuating the toil of supermarket checkout clerks when they could be doing better things with their lifes like … working for a company that makes self-checkout technology.
Should be named after me. I’m a card-carrying line-killer, especially at movie theater snack bars. My wife used to mock this claim until she saw it in action. Now, when we go to the movies together, I’ll pick a snack bar queue and stand in it to kill it, while she stands in another queue. When the people in front of me finally reach the front of the line and the kid at the counter says “May I help you?” only then will those chuckleheads raise their eyes to the menu board and try to decipher the menu. “Oh, I dunno… do I want popcorn? You got any Diet Mr Pibb? You take checks, right? Hold on, I think I have my punch card here, last time I was here I’d punched enough holes for a small bag of Skittles.” Meanwhile, my movie’s starting, the trailers long since finished, and my wife has successfully purchased our Edible Regrettables in the other line. In ten years of marriage, not once have I reached the front of my line before she reaches the front of hers. Not even close.
It’s one of the two ways in which the Universe conspires against me. The other one has to do with the parking garage here at Warner Bros. I often work late, sometimes (like tonight) well past 10:00 PM, and often by the time I get to my car it’s one of the only cars left in the garage. I park in a different spot every day since I don’t rate a reserved space, but somehow, on any night when I go out to my car and there are only one or two other cars on that floor of the garage, there’s a car parked right next to my driver’s door. Not halfway across the structure, never blocking my passenger door, not in a far corner, nor five or ten spaces away. Just right next to my driver’s side door. Different car every time, too, so it’s not somebody deliberately fucking with me. I used to photograph it every time it happened, so I have a sizable collection on my old phone of pictures of a vast parking garage, nearly empty except for my car and the one blocking my door.
But if these two phenomena are the only things that bug me, I believe I’ve ended up pretty goddamned fortunate when they handed out Personal Hells. I don’t even bitch about them anymore. They’re just a part of me now.
As someone that’s worked in, then run, supermarkets for 20 years, I’m 100% sure the biggest factor in how fast you’re going to get through is your operator.
I know all of my operators, and how they rank relative to each other (information a shopper doesn’t have) and I can always pick the fastest lane by just finding the fastest operator on that shift. It doesn’t matter who they’re dealing with or what goes pear-shaped (short of a hardware breakdown) - ‘easy’ customers in a slow operator will still be waiting while I’m through along with 3 other old people with full trolleys.
That said, the very small stores here (inner-city “metro” style supermarkets) that use serpentine lines can move through people like there’s no tomorrow. I’m always surprised at just how quickly they can churn people out. I’d love to redesign my current store’s checkouts to work like that, but it’s really got to be baked in from the get-go because your typical long-and-wide checkouts do not lend themselves to it at all. The other catch is they don’t work so well with big trolleys - you’ve still got to have full sized checkouts to serve those so you have somewhere to unload and somewhere to store the packed bags until the trolley is free. If every customer is <10 items, sure, but when it’s 100 each that becomes a space issue.
As to self-checkouts, as someone that is literally as experienced as you could hope to be at using checkouts, they slow me down too - mostly because you have to pause so long between each item for the scales on the packing side to agree you’ve put it down so it knows you’re not stealing anything. That said, people really appreciate having that extra degree of agency over their shopping experience, and I think that’s something they find even more appealing than the expectation that they’ll be faster. (Also they hate us and want to steal our jobs )
The guy parking next to you all the time is probably Jay Leno. The dude has an absurd number of cars. (My SO suffers from this same problem - we park in the back 40 at every store and some bag of dicks parks next to his driver-side door every muthfuqin’ time.)
I don’t know why everyone’s hating on the self-check so much. In most cases, if one is available, it will be considerably faster for me than dealing with the old cheque writers, EBT users and college-age kids who can’t be arsed to get off the phone for 5 minutes (or stop texting for a similar period of time) whom I invariable find in front of me at a cashier line, no matter which cashier line I pick.
You completely misunderstood. I’m not concerned about depriving somebody of their Galtian joy at being the ultimate cashier. I’m concerned about taking away their paycheck. Maybe those cashiers didn’t dream of being cashiers, but I’m willing to bet they envisioned a future with a home and food on the table.
Libertarianism doesn’t mean you don’t give a damn about your neighbor. If you think poverty makes people freer, I would urge you to listen to some actual poor people, and try to care about what they experience.
When I was working on Will & Grace I had occasion to stroll right by Leno’s parking space at the KNBC building nearly every week, and indeed he had a great variety of cars. His yellow Corvette and white Imperial were reliable standbys, but you never knew what he’d turn up in. His parking space always has an old-school oil slick near the front, like no other parking spot at that studio has.
How about we just choose the line with the most attractive checker and/or fellow customers? Our “monkey brain” sees value in spending time with potentially higher-troop-status individuals, so we won’t mind the wait quite so much.
It seems to work in airports, and those often have more unwieldy trolleys. There are differences (people often come in bursts and there’s a whole room available for queueing), so it may not work as well in supermarkets. From the article:
Do supermarkets actually want to shorten queues? They may be giving up valuable real estate for potential queues and bored shoppers may end up buying more discretionary items.
Some small baskets/carts may have a lot of individual items to be scanned, while large carts have bulk items. The payment stage takes about the same time anyway, so fewer customers may be better (even if they have bigger carts).
Working from home makes things easier, but I find the best way is to go to a small supermarket 3-4 times a week on the way home from dropping off the kids at school. You have less choice and less distance to walk between the items on your list, which reduces the time and money spent there. It’s also just after most people have gone to work, so I’m usually done in 15 minutes and haven’t spent any more time on travelling than I otherwise would have. What’s more, even with 8 people in the house (six adults and two kids), we manage to survive with a 100l fridge/freezer (and a larger chest freezer in the basement). Apart from a few longer-term items, it’s full of food for that evening and the next day.
That’s because approximately 90% of the population is right-handed, and so they tend to naturally head to the right.
… I don’t follow. Why would one lead to the other? “And so” and “naturally” are not an explanation. I am definitely right-handed and tend to head to the left.
… If one check-out line is significantly less accessible or more obnoxious, then fewer people can use it, so those who can use it may be able to get through it faster. However, in my experience, almost all check-out lines seem about equally inaccessible and obnoxious, given the flourescent lights and the effing machines that effing go effing beep.
Yes, that’s totally how it would work,. they wouldn’t all just migrate to some other service industry job because for one reason or another that’s the only thing they can get at their experience level, the Free Market’s Invisible Hand will magically give them enough free time to get a “good” job, and have them stop being “lazy”.
If I find myself waiting in a long lineup in a busy store with too few aisles open, I pull out my cell phone, call the store, ask for the manager, and politely explain I am calling from checkout, the lines are too long, and they needs more cashiers at the front. If he says none are available, I politely suggest he or she spend a few minutes on checkout themself. This doesn’t usually produce results fast enough to get me through any quicker, but it amuses my fellow shoppers.
Although the underlying software is more or less the same, the UI does vary.
The Tesco system in the UK allows this: I walk up to the machine, scan the newspaper, put the money in the slot, wait till it issues my change and depart. I don’t have to touch any buttons at all.
People struggle with self checkouts because, in my experience, they cannot be bothered to learn how to use them. It takes only a little thought to ensure that everything you pick up has a barcode, remember the sequence of events, and blast through the system at speed. The fastest person I’ve ever seen at a self checkout was a woman sergeant in logistics. I’m pretty good because, as someone who has designed software and UIs, I can be bothered to think through the system. But I get annoyed by self checkouts with inferior UIs; the Sainsbury’s one is dreadful and requires constant button pressing, and doesn’t even have nfc in our local one.
There are also a lot of people who can’t work self checkout fuel pumps; one of our local fuel stations has solved this by running completely unattended so that users know they won’t be held up by the incapable, and I use it for that reason.
If I come over as crabby, I regard visiting supermarkets and fuel pumps as a tedious job to be done as quickly as possible. I’d rather the supermarket put more effort into keeping the shelves stocked than in trying to give me an interactive checkout experience. How am I today? Please take my money.
starrygordon: I have found that the best way of dealing with multiple lines is to check for the line with the best-looking people on it, or the best-looking cashier. I then ogle that person while running erotic fantasies through my mind.
Genius!
If you’re seriously concerned with the time spent in the supermarket however, take note of at which time of day the store tends to have the best customer-to-cashier ratio.
My housemate & I took to grocery shopping at 10:00 at night. We pretty much owned the store at that hour.
Yeah, me too. It’s a strong tendency in me, too, and one that I first noticed at Disneyland. If you come in through the front entrance, once you scan your ticket and shuffle through the turnstile, you end up in a small courtyard in front of the floral Mickey garden. From there, there are two tunnels available to you to enter the park beneath the train tracks. I don’t ever remember going through the right-hand tunnel, not once in forty years. Last time we visited, my wife tried to steer us through that tunnel, and I found myself unaccountably resisting. Don’t know why, but I don’t wanna go through the right-hand tunnel, even though it looks functionally identical.
The article is not only shallow, it’s wrong. (Why yes, I did study queuing theory in college, and have worked in grocery stores as well as shopping in them : - ) Nice explanation about Erlang, though.
Single-queue multi-server systems are faster, but they’re not much faster on average, compared to multi-queue systems where customers can jump queues if the next server over isn’t busy.
The big difference they make isn’t reducing the average wait time, it’s reducing the variance, so customers are almost always getting a near-average service time, instead of sometimes getting stuck in an extra-slow queue (which they hate) and sometimes in an extra-fast queue (which they’re fine with, but don’t usually remember.)
But grocery stores don’t work like pure abstract queuing theory examples (unlike banks) - serpentine lines are a real problem with shopping carts, especially the kind with two fixed direction wheels and two rotating ones, and handling the busy hour means you have to allow lots of extra maneuvering room for them, unlike separate lines which can just overflow into the merchandise aisles. And supermarket managers are smart about doing things like putting the fast cashiers in the express lines, and customers get grumpier about being stuck in a slow line when they’re only getting a couple of things than when they’ve got a full shopping cart, so you want to clear the express lines fast. And sometimes as a customer it’s faster to be in the line with one person with a medium load ahead of you than the express line with five people ahead, because that line’s going to have five people taking the time to pay for their groceries even though actually scanning the groceries may take less time.
If it’s some place where I might know the tellers, like the local post office, and lines are moving very slowly, I may ask in a Very Loud Voice “Is this the line for people that want to tell their life story?”
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