How long do patients wait?

This week’s The Numbers Guy column in the Wall Street Journal looks at how long patients wait for care (Long Medical Waits Prove Hard to Cure, May 25). The setting to have in mind is not how many minutes past your appointment time you spend in the waiting room. Rather, focus on actually getting an [...]

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The Spirit of baggage fees

Spirit Airlines has  made some news this week by announcing some tweaks to their fee structure. Most notably they are increasing the fee for carrying on a bag (they are the only US airline that charges for carry ons unless you consider charging for earlier boarding a form of charging for a carry on). If [...]

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Managing Customers: Data hogs and Showrooming

I am teaching service operations this quarter and for the first class I have the students read Frances Frei’s “The Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right” (HBR, Apr 2008). I have in the past said how much I like this article. Now, Frances and her collaborator Anne Morriss have developed the framework presented in that article into [...]

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American Airlines will pay you to check a bag

OK, so my headline is a little misleading. By “pay” I mean give you 500 bonus frequent flier miles and by “you” I mean elite members of their AAdvantage frequent flier program who happens to be traveling from Boston. Here is how they explain the offer: Through November 22, 2011, American Airlines will offer AAdvantage® elite status [...]

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Are baggage fees good for society?

A different sort of post today. This one is about a research paper that Gady and I recently finished with our colleague Achal Bassamboo. The paper is called “Would the Social Planner Let Bags Fly Free?” It deals with ancillary services — things like checking bags or printing boarding passes that service firms provide in [...]

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Pulling the plug at Starbucks

This summer I added the Starbucks app to my phone and can now pay for lattes with it. This has had the unfortunate consequence of driving home just how much my family can spend on over-priced coffee as I now get multiple emails per week as the card paired with my phone gets reloaded. So far, [...]

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iPad2: Product Rationing and Allocation Schemes

For my first blog, I’d like to share a personal experience and link it to some questions of interest to the Operations Room, which has blossomed under the nourishing care of my colleagues Professors Allon and Lariviere.  (Thank you, Gad and Marty!) On March 2, 2011, Apple announced the “iPad2: Thinner. Lighter. Faster. FaceTime. Smart [...]

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Black Friday, baggage fees, & the automobile supply chain

Yesterday, we talked restaurants. Today, we have a more random selections of topics. Black Friday Sales. I am rather fascinated with how retailers manage the queue of waiting customers on Black Friday. Now the Feds are interested and regulation may be coming. The New York Times reports that Wal-Mart has been fighting tooth and nail [...]

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Bagging process design

So what is it worth to reduce the use of bags at your local grocery store? OK, so for one store, it may not be worth too much, but if you have over 1,000 stores like Supervalu does, saving a few bags here and there can be real money. Thus the chain has instituted a [...]

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How did Yogi Berra know it was too crowded?

The statement that “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” is usually attributed to Yogi Berra. But it raises an interesting question: How do you know if it is crowded if you don’t go? As the Globe and Mail reports, a British software developer is taking on this question by mining Foursquare data (FourSquare, the [...]

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