What I didn't see in this article is why retailers don't do this today. I see a lot of positives listed and no negatives, so it seems like a no-brainer, right? Yet the biggest retailers like Walmart and Target have tons of lanes, and even do staggered front/back lanes which are terrible for the customers. Is it because there are negative feelings to seeing a long line, and that people do not expect it to be fast so they abandon their purchase?
There are many pros and cons other than just time-efficiency in a store.
Spatially, its actually quite complex to make one long line (it will probably have to snake around your store, and you'll need those awful movable tape barriers everywhere to make sure everyone keeps in line - customers hate these) and then to make one long line split evenly into several end points is not easy either (doing this may also take up a lot of valuable floor space).
Also, you could just have a store layout inherited from the 60s and its too expensive to change it right now...
Some places do this. Fry's Electronics, for example. It works fine. Some supermarkets I've been in do this for their express lines ("10 items or less").
Oh, and airline ticket counters are routinely run this way.
Add to this, Fry's also stacks the "wait line" area with lots of high-margin low-cost goodies like candies and trinkets. I myself have succumbed to grabbing some trail mix or a thumbdrive while waiting there.
I always figured it was because of the layout problem of getting many cashier stations clustered together at the end of a long queue area. I hadn't thought about the psychological effect of a single long line though.
It's being rolled out slowly. Target in Emeryville has a rather advanced queuing system like this, but customers definitely don't like it and don't necessarily realize it's faster, perhaps because Target has less cashiers as a result of the decreased wait.
I went through that system a few times. They had a set of three lines (A,B,C) that fed a bank of cashiers; a screen overhead flashed instructions like "A => cashier 7", then "B => cashier 5" and then "C => cashier 1".
It felt more stressful, efficiency be damned. You spend more time at the "front" of your line (A,B,C) , waiting for the board to change. In a traditional system you can hook in behind someone and "zone out" / chat with your SO until you reach the register. In this system I felt like I had to pay attention the whole time and I was interrupted every time the bell rang, even if it was A's turn and I was in line C.
Yes, you're right. The first time I did it I actually did zone out and had basically no idea what was going on. I think I missed my turn and eventually accidentally brazenly walked up to a cashier that probably wasn't assigned to me. The second time I did it I was more appropriately stressed and obedient.
Actually, the article did mention one strike against using one line (albeit briefly):
And they prefer to choose their own line rather than wait in a single-file line for the next available register—even though that set-up has proven to be faster, research on queuing shows.
In the UK, Tesco and other grocery retailers do this. I've seen this in place in the USA at the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle (an enormously crowded store that moves along well).
Based on these data points, it would seem as though more crowded places use this optimization.
Besides the other reasons, retailers have incentives to keep you in the store as long as possible without you getting so annoyed you won't come back, especially near the checkout where they put their most shiny things out for you to impulse buy.
