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Which lineup in the store is faster?

Each of us spends hours of life, standing in line at supermarkets. Surely you noticed that the neighboring queues are moving at different speeds. Queue speed depends on the number of items in each customer’s shopping cart.



Dan Meyer from Stanford University for months measured the speed of cash registers, put all the data in the table and derived the following formula:
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  y = 2,9572x + 41,174 

This is the formula for the dependence of service speed in seconds (y) on the quantity of goods (x).



Of course, the sample is small. Apparently, Dan measured only his own indicators.

But then he dared to ask the store manager to provide this information. He first refused, and then gave him a printout from the cash scanner about the effectiveness of one cashier per shift ( PDF ). The value of this information is difficult to overestimate.



From the printout (this is a grocery supermarket), we see that the goods at the checkout are scanned at a speed of 21.28 pieces per minute, that is, about 2.8 seconds per unit of goods.

Another important parameter is the second line. This is the “wait time” between product scan sessions. At this time there is a calculation, packaging, other actions. So, on average, the cashier spends 35 seconds (0.58 minutes) per customer.

This is all you need to know to calculate the speed of queues in the supermarket. Each person - 35 seconds, each item in the basket - plus 2.8 seconds. For example, one person with 14 units of goods (35 + 2.8 * 14) is equal to two people with one product each (35 * 2 + 2.8 * 2).

As you can see, this is close to the parameters in the Dehn formula (2.95 seconds per product, 41 seconds per buyer).

Of course, in different stores the formula may vary. For example, in some stores the cashier does not help to pack the goods, so the speed of service (35 seconds) increases significantly. It is best to get data on the effectiveness of service from the supermarket where you personally buy the products.

Obviously, the scanning speed is about the same for everyone - from 2.8 to 3 seconds. So it remains to measure the average interval between scanning sessions. And then, walking along the ticket office with a pointed eye, you quickly calculate the speed of each queue in seconds.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/107560/


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