Customs queues

The Numbers Guy column in today’s Wall Street Journal relates to our recent post on delays clearing customs at Heathrow (Border Delay Data Leave Fliers Up in the Air, May 5). He hits on a number of points similar to what we brought up. First, demands are going to be very peaked over the day. [...]

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Queues become political at Heathrow

Here at the Operations Room, we like queues — not so much standing in them but talking about them. Indeed, about the only thing better than us talking about queues would be if queues became a political issue and people with impressive job titles were forced to talk about them. And that is exactly what [...]

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How Home Depot tackles queues

Yesterday, we looked at how Disney was taking on lines; today, Home Depot is up. Fast Company has a brief article on what the home-improvement chain is doing to keep customers moving through its stores (Home Depot Innovates Customer Checkouts, Apr 16). The article points to four things (which are numbered on the diagram below): PLASTIC [...]

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Disney Queue Management, The Next Generation

Few companies are as celebrated for their ability to manage queues and customer waits as Disney. As we have posted about before, The Mouse has raised moving people through lines to a science (even as their Anaheim neighbors have screwed up queues). Now Fox News reports on a Disney program called NextGen that will take [...]

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Paying when patients wait

The Daily had an interesting story on a handful of doctors who are paying their patients — either explicitly in cash or in the form of a gift — when they make their patients wait past their appointment times (Their Wait in Gold, Mar 19). There’s a promising new trend afoot in doctors’ offices around [...]

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Even Angels can’t manage queues

Selling baseball tickets should be easy — especially if it is before the start of the season and fancy revenue management schemes haven’t kicked in. But the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (hereafter, simply the Angels since they have the stupidest, most awkward name in the majors) managed to screw it up. Here is how the Orange [...]

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From Chinese toilets to fulfillment center sweatshops

It’s another Friday round of random round ups. First up, Chinese potties! As we wrote about earlier this week, there have been Occupy Men’s Room protest to demand that public accommodations have more women’s toilets then men’s — a standard that is often referred to has potty parity. The protests began in the city of Guangzhou, [...]

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The fight for potty parity in China

In the US, Occupy Wall Street led many other protests all opposed to the perceived evils of income inequality. Now Occupy protests have come to China. The subject of the protesters’ ire, however, is a more basic form of inequality: The disparity in waiting times for men’s and women’s public toilets. That right, it’s time [...]

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Super Bowl Congestion

I promised Gady that I would post something about the Super Bowl. (I had assumed that Jan wouldn’t know about the game.) I had though of revisiting how pizza parlors prepare for the game since there has been much in the news about the volume of junk Americans will consume while watching the Giants and [...]

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Using RFID to eliminate airport queues

How should airlines get passengers through airports with minimal delay? One possibility is to provide loads of capacity. There are two ways to do that. One is hire lots of staff or put out lots of kiosks. That requires both money and space. The Wall Street Journal reports (The Trump Card at Check-In, Dec 29) [...]

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