Comments on: Mirrors Reduce the Average Waiting Time for Elevators – Emotionally, but not Physically https://6sigma.com/on-queueing-and-elevator-mirrors/ Six Sigma Certification and Training Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:01:42 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jason https://6sigma.com/on-queueing-and-elevator-mirrors/#comment-24775 Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:15:29 +0000 https://opexlearning.com/resources/384/on-queueing-and-elevator-mirrors#comment-24775 The psychology of waiting sometimes overrides queuing efficiency. Supermarket checkout lines are a great example. Individual queues for each checker is the inefficient approach but it is almost universally used. The abundance of impulse purchase goods, trashy magazines and now flat panel looping ads shows that grocery stores prefer this inefficient model.

There is a Whole Paycheck err… Whole Foods near where I live that during peak periods will actually rope off the individual queues and line everyone up into a single queue (they do this because the individual queue start stretching down the aisles and cause grid lock). This invariably makes the shopper grumpy but is significantly faster.

Who knew there was a whole genre of elevator mirror pictures… good stuff.

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