Spying on Trader Joe’s

OK, another story about pandemic driven lines. But this one has a twist. Yes, the virus is forcing lines to form outside of stores, but what would you give to be able to see the line before you left the house? Apparently, if you live across the street from a Trader Joe’s, your friends pester you enough about the current line situation that you set up a web cam or just tweet regularly (Is There a Line at Trader Joe’s? Social-Media Spies Are Keeping Track, Jun 12, Wall Street Journal).

The die-hard fans of Trader Joe’s may be waiting the longest. The grocery chain is known for its specialty items, cultlike following and ubiquitous lines that were bad enough before the pandemic. Now, even as the economy reopens, queues at several locations can stretch for blocks beyond the entrance.

Coming to the rescue is an informal network of Good Samaritans who are quarantined with prime views of a local Trader Joe’s. As a public service, they regularly tweet or broadcast updates on the lines outside.

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Brits and queues!

The British are famous for queuing. The stereotype has them as embracing orderly waiting their turn. But what if it’s waiting to vote in Parliament?

The powers that be in London have decided that online voting won’t do and that MPs should vote in person. There was consequently an in-person vote on a measure mandating this but the actual vote was executed with the appropriate social distancing guidelines. Here is how Politico described what went down (House of Commons bans virtual voting, opts for a queue, Jun 2):

Standing in a long line stretching from the chamber through to Westminster Hall and out of the building, roughly two-thirds of MPs slowly edged their way into the chamber to cast their votes in a process that took just over 45 minutes.

The system replaces the usual “divisions,” which see MPs walk through either the Aye or No lobby and usually take around 15 minutes, even if all 639 voting members are present.

What might that look like? Check out the video from the Guardian:

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The coronavirus and lines

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has changed many aspects of American life. According to the Washington Post is also has forced many people — particularly those in poor areas — into lines (Day-to-day, line-to-line, April 26). Here is their description of life in the Bronx:

[A] line of 32 people stretched out from the front door of the bank where the computers were still down and Halls was still sitting in his folding chair, watching his neighborhood come to life.

Across the street, a line was forming at the pharmacy. A few doors down, the line was growing at the credit union. Around the corner, people were lining up for the bus, for the lottery, for the check-cashers and the two hawkers at folding tables spread with $5 masks, $10 Advil and $20 cough syrup. Two months into the coronavirus pandemic, this is what life was becoming in one of the poorest and hardest-hit neighborhoods in America. A life of lines.

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Allocating escalator capacity revisited

Escalators are back in the news! A little over a year ago, Transport for London (i.e., the London Tube) got some press for an experiment they ran essentially prohibiting people from walking up the escalators at one of their stations. (We posted about that here.) Now the New York Times has seen fit to revisit the topic (Why You Shouldn’t Walk on Escalators, Apr 4). The Times’ definitive stance has not gone unchallenged. Indeed, Gizmodo has an essay taking the opposite side (Why You Should Always Walk on Escalators, Apr 4).

The source of controversy here is that Transport for London found that escalators moved more people per hour and delays to get on the escalators were shorter when people were kept from walking up the stairs. This is obviously a paradox. From an individual point of view, walking up the stairs has to be faster. If each individual can move faster, how can the overall wait be worse?

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How has mobile ordering impacted delays at Starbucks

In a perfect world, technology solves problems instead of creating them. Things don’t always go that way. Take, for example, Starbucks’ mobile ordering. This is, in theory, a convenience for users of their app. They can place an order before hitting the store, pay automatically, and get their drink and food without waiting in line.

Or at least that is the theory. The reality is that a surge in mobile orders has created a bunch of headaches for the coffee chain. Here are some details from when they announced their earnings at the end of January (Starbucks Tempers Revenue Forecast, Jan 26, Wall Street Journal).

Mobile order-and-pay represented 7% of U.S. company-operated transactions in the quarter, up from 3% in the prior year. The number of its highest-volume stores for mobile order-and-pay, where orders placed via the app account for more than 20% of transactions during peak hours, doubled to 1,200 stores over the prior quarter.

The high rate of mobile ordering was blamed by Starbucks for increased waits and with that lost customers. In the last quarter, dollar sales were up because the average purchase size outweighed a 2% decline in transaction.

But just how bad is the delay? That’s the subject of a recent Business Insider piece. The headline pretty much lays out the article’s agenda: We went to Starbucks every day for a week to see how the coffee giant is dealing with its biggest problem (March 19).

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On pizza and queues

Di Fara Pizza is a small, single-location pizza place in Brooklyn. According to its Wikipedia entry (yes, it has a Wikipedia entry), it has been named to many, many lists of the best pizza in New York City. The place’s secret sauce is Dom DeMarco, the shop’s owner, who essentially makes every pie. He opened the shop in 1964 and is now 79. He doesn’t work too fast and really does everything right down to slicing basil on to each slice. Consequently, the lines can be a tad long. It is one of the principle things that on-line reviewers comment on:

It’s nice to see that the original pizza making man still has the passion to make pizza. But the wait is ridiculously long and people in there are just too pushy. “Next! What do you want?”

So how does that kind of wait affect their business and the customer experience? That was the topic of discussion of a recent episode of The Gist podcast (Your Food Will Be Ready When You Look Hungry Enough, Oct 12).

The guest of that episode is Dan Pashman, who describes his visit to Di Fara as well as the research he did to put together an episode of his own podcast, The Sporkful (Is This Pizza Worth Waiting For?, Aug 11).

Some of that reporting also ended up in an episode of Freakonomics Radio (What Are You Waiting For?, Aug 10)

That’s right: The man made one trip to Brooklyn and it resulted in three podcast episodes.

The Sporkful and Freakonomics episodes are worth a listening. Both talk about different aspects of managing queues. The former emphasizes more psychology and physiology (especially how waiting affects hunger) while the latter puts more emphasis on the economics of queue.

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Pooling and queues

Queuing has been in the news lately. First, the Wall Street Journal’s most recent The Numbers column was on queuing theory (The Science of Standing in Line, Oct 7). The story is in someways disappointing since it emphasizes the history of queuing over its current applications or general insights. However, it does feature this rather spiffy graphic contrasting service systems in which several servers pull from a common queue as opposed to each server having a separate line.

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Managing line shoppers

I must confess that I have never really been enthralled by Trader Joe’s. I have never lived close by one so it was a convenient option for shopping nor have I ever been desperately loyal to their private label products. But there certainly are people who love Trader Joe’s and their stores can be quite busy. As consequence, the check out lines at some locations can be a special sort of experience. McSweeny’s offers a parody “Trader Joe’s Waiting in Line App” asking user to rate their overall shopping experience on the following scale:

• 4 stars: Took a while, but got what I needed.
• 3 stars: Eerily friendly cashier weirded me out; there was hardly any bagged lettuce left.
• 2 stars: Constant gridlock. Teeth gritted the whole time.
• 1 star: Anarchy. Like the ending of Lord of the Flies.

What does the ending of Lord of the Flies look like? Check out BuzzFeed’s “The Nightmare Of Shopping At Trader Joe’s In Manhattan.” It’s one thing to have to mark where the line starts; it’s another to need a sign marking the middle of the line so clueless (or super-aggressive) shoppers don’t cut the queue.

What then is a shopper to do? According to a recent Slate piece, the answer is to shop while in line (The Six Rules of Line-Shopping at Trader Joe’s, Aug 24).

Not long ago I was waiting in line at the smaller-than-average and perpetually mobbed Trader Joe’s near Union Square in Manhattan when I noticed the shopper in front of me had come up with a clever, possibly devious solution to the crowd problem. Upon entering the store, she claimed a shopping cart and staked out a spot in the checkout line (which snaked around almost the entire perimeter of the store). She proceeded to do all her shopping from her place in line: picking up produce as the line crept through the produce aisle, frozen goods as it passed by the freezer case, cereal when it neared the cereal section.

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A little more on running queues in reverse order

A quick update on Wednesday’s post on running queues last-in, first-out. First, the Washington Post had a story on this as well (Researchers have discovered a better way to wait in line, and you’re going to hate it, Sep 9) and to their credit they get the gist of the model right; the fact that customers value getting served early is key to their results.

Second, I was asked to speak about this article on an NPR station out in California (AirTalk, KPCC, Sep 10). You can hear it here.

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Would we be better off if queues ran in reverse order?

Suppose you are waiting in line for something. How would you expect the service provider to take people out of the line?

Unless you are at some place like an emergency room where different customers have clearly different needs and different levels of urgency, you might expect that customers are served in the order of their arrival — that is, a first-in, first-out discipline is used. That’s a natural and common assumption (at least in the US). It is also makes headlines like “Have we been queuing all wrong? Lines move faster if the person at the back is served first, study finds” (Daily Mail, Aug 14) or “Danish researchers have an enraging proposal to speed up queues: Serve the last person first” (Quartz, Sep 7) attention grabbing . Here is the crux of the Daily Mail article:

A group of Danish researchers have discovered a rather unexpected solution to the long lines of people that can appear ahead of new iPhone launches or to get into sporting events.

They say serving the person at the back of the queue first can actually make lines move faster – something which may horrify British and Americans who adhere to the strict etiquette of waiting your turn.

Instead it suggests people like the Italians, who often frustrate other tourists with their lack of regard for the order of a queue, may have been on to something after all.

The findings could put an end to traditions which have become almost British institutions such as queuing to get tickets for Wimbledon or the Proms.

So what is going on here? Is serving customer last-in, first-out really the answer to queuing woes?

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