This is one of many texts written in or around 2012 but only published much later. Unlike most of these, I have not added or edited significantly, and the main text reflects the unpublished original unusually closely (for now, at least). However, the original was marked as work-in-progress, implying that there might be things that I intended to add at the time that are not present. (Generally, I do have quite a few ideas on queueing. Also see portions of some later texts, e.g. [1] and [2].)
Since the original writing, I have tried very hard to avoid excessive queues, including by buying stamps in smaller “convenience stores”, which (at least, in Germany) often provide them, while often having no queue at all. (I also use stamps much more rarely these days.) For food and the like, a good trick is to hit grocery stores very early in the morning or very late in the evening, and to try to avoid days (especially, the day before any legal holiday) with an increased likelihood of a full store. Queueing, however, is and remains something that is handled incompetently and/or with no regard for the interests of the customers by various stores.
A particular problem area is stores that (unlike grocery stores) do not necessarily have a continuous stream of customers at the checkout. Here, the checkout can be neglected in a horrifying manner. For instance, during one visit to Kodi (a German household-goods chain), I found an unmanned cash register when I wanted to pay, someone from the staff soon appeared, headed towards me—and stopped to answer a question from another customer for several minutes (!) before actually getting to where she should be, doing her job at the cash register. She then caused another several minutes of delay for a trivial checkout, because the cash register lacked change, which forced her to run away to get more money—amateur hour! All in all, something that should have taken, maybe, thirty seconds, between her scanning a few items and my paying, actually took around ten minutes.
But is not answering customer questions also her job?
Only when it does not interfere with the her cash-register duties. Any store must, during opening hours, either have someone constantly manning at least one cash register or someone who can man it “on demand” virtually immediately.
In particular, there were other workers in the store. She could simply have pointed to one of them and excused herself with the factual claim that the cash register took precedence.
Having run out of stamps, I went to visit the (German) post office. At the time, going during the lunch-hour was my only possibility to meet the restrictive opening hours, and that was just what I did.
To my annoyance, there were at least two dozen queuers ahead of me, but with four open counters and a great likelihood that others would be opened to meet the rush, should it be necessary, I assumed that the wait would be acceptable. I picked my book out of my pocket and spent the waiting time reading.
The wait, however, went far longer than I had anticipated, likely close to half-an-hour. (I write several months after the incident and do not remember the exact duration.) As I was the next in line, I put my book away and had a look around. I could make two easy observations:
Firstly, the queue behind me was not the two dozen that once had been before me, but had reached at least three dozen. (Note that the size of this queue only gives a lower limit on the number of customers who wanted to be served: A great many others had likely turned away, discouraged by the length of the queue, or already given up waiting—as would I, had the book been less entertaining.)
Secondly, there were a grand-total of three (3!) counters opened...
During lunch-hour, with a very long and growing (!) queue, three out of eight or ten counters were opened. Indeed, instead of opening more counters to meet the rush, the post had closed one of the counters originally open.
My own errand, once at the counter, took less than thirty seconds. Using this as a baseline, even three counters would be able to pull through more than three customers per minute (but less than six, due to time lost between customers), and the original queuers might have been served within 4–8 minutes. Factoring in more time-consuming cases, say the need to collect a package from a storage room, would increase this time considerably, but not to half-an-hour: If we assume an average time of two minutes per customer, with three counters throughout and a fourth for a part of the time, roughly 15 minutes seems reasonable. (With an even lesser time, in both cases, had the post office followed my expectations, done its duty, and opened further counters.)
The problem was likely that what might seem to be a reasonable assumption as to the average (and what might even be true for the median) often fails due to individual outliers. Consider e.g. an individual customer who needs ten minutes or more because a package has been lost—and who for that time reduces the capacity to two counters. Indeed, even just three such cases could bring the fifteen minutes close to thirty.
Here we see another very strong reason to have a greater number of counters open, respectively to open additional counters as a queue grows.
In smaller grocery stores, I regularly observe how the personnel allows the queue to the single open cash-register to move beyond a dozen queuers before a second is opened—and often only after the customers have explicitly asked for it.
Not only do the stores merely react to a situation (where they should be preemptive), but they react far too late.
The below paragraph seems detached from a greater context that I cannot reconstruct, maybe, as a consequence of that “work-in-progress” status. It does reflect a common attitude, however, and I leave it in.
(It might have been intended for the post-office discussion, and simply have been displaced, but the explicit mention of “second”, as opposed to e.g. “another”, speaks against this. More likely, it was an incomplete retelling relating to the previous two paragraphs.)
As one customer asked one of several non-cashiers to open a second counter, she received the rude answer “I have other things to do.”—to which I wish to reply (but did not, being some distance away): Nothing so important that it cannot wait, when customers are not getting served.
This is so thoroughly and utterly incompetent that I find it hard to believe that the problem is so prevalent (or would, did I not regularly observe it):
There are two sides to the issue, namely the customers’ and the stores’:
Customers: Lose, because they waste time waiting that they could have used more productively, including by enjoying their leisure time, doing other errands (which might well include spending more money in the store at hand), or learning something. Further, queueing can be stressful and delay recuperation after a hard day’s work. In a worst case scenario, someone might miss a train or have to abandon the queue (thus having queued in vain) to catch said train. In the case above, it cut into my lunch hour, during which I was also supposed to eat something and be back at work in a reasonable time.
Stores: Lose both custom and goodwill. Notably, and this is of extreme importance to understanding the issue, they do not gain something through having spent less man-power on serving customers (except where they have simultaneously lost a customer, which more than outweighs the gain). The same amount of time has to be spent anyway, and the question is merely whether 2X man-hours are spent by one cashier over 2X hours or by two cashiers over X hours. The only actual losses that occur is through the need to occasionally move a shelf-stocker to a counter or vice versa. Through good planning, however, such losses can be kept small and cause only minimal disturbances in the overall flow—and, in any case, the gains through more, more satisfied, and more spendable customers will outweigh such losses.