Queues

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Researchers in the field have justified their concentration on these matters on the grounds that customers consistently report great aversion to having to wait at supermarket (and other) checkouts (see Meidan and Tomes, 1991; Tom and Lucey, 1995). Crucially, it has been claimed (e.g. Katz et al., 1991; Taylor, 1994) that longish waits impact negatively on customer evaluations of an outlet's quality because long queues affect the customer's perceptions of the "punctuality" of a service (i.e. how promptly customer requirements are satisfied) and hence his or her ratings of the service provider's overall efficiency and reliability. The level of resources that a store should devote to reducing queue lengths is however subject to debate. For instance, Meidan and Tomes (1991) concluded from their study of the shopping habits and preferences of the customers of 92 North of England cash and carry outlets that there was little point in outlet managers attempting to reduce average queue durations since all the stores in the sample were regarded by customers as suffering from the long-wait malady. Hence, expected queuing time was not a significant determinant of the customer's choice of a particular outlet.

The queuing experience

The proposition that customers intensely and universally dislike queuing is based on the idea that people typically experience emotional discomfort (notably feelings of being cramped and crowded and of frustration at not being able to get away) while waiting-in-line (Schmitt et al., 1992; Schopler and Stockdale, 1977). In particular they are said to lose control over their immediate situation as they cannot move around freely and might be forced into close physical propinquity with non-favoured individuals (Baron and Rodin, 1978). It has been argued (see Hui and Tse, 1996) that a person's sense of control significantly ameliorates his or her physical and psychological reactions to stressful events because it reaffirms the individual's competence and mastery over the environment. Note moreover how the mental distressassociated with queuing may be seen by customers as resulting not from their own misdemeanours, but rather the incompetence of those who manage the store. A number of empirical studies have concluded that a customer's attribution of the cause of a delay substantially affects its emotional consequences (see Taylor, 1994; Tom and Lucey, 1995). According to these investigations, customers are more dissatisfied with longer than expected waits caused by difficulties that the store could have remedied (e.g. inefficient checkout personnel, understaffing, failure to provide express checkouts) than with delays due to external factors such as random variations in store crowding, till breakdowns, the time of day (some periods are inevitably busier than others) or the presence of customers with large amounts of shopping. This was particularly true if little effort on the part of the service provider was needed to improve the situation and/or the problem engendering the delay was a regular occurrence. It appeared, therefore, that the reasons for a long queue were major determinants of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, not just the delay's duration.

Bernakiva and Lerman (1995) argued that time spent in queues is resented because it represents "empty time", i.e. blank space between desired activities and events; intervals perceived as "stolen" from a person's life and which, therefore, the individual wishes to keep as short as possible. Evidence of the desire to minimise empty time derives from studies which have suggested that the "cost" of a minute of delay involved in waiting for a bus is regarded by passengers as two or three times that of a minute actually spent travelling on it; and that people who lose parts of their lunch breaks through having to queue feel greater levels of frustration than do other persons (Larson, 1987). Research has indicated that the amount of empty queuing time that a person finds tolerable depends on a number of variables; especially the physical environment surrounding the queue, perceptions that a queue is being managed in a socially just manner (i.e. following strictly the first-in first-out principle), and the presence of indicators of a delay's likely duration (Hui and Tse, 1996; Larson 1987; Maister, 1985). Uncertainty about how much time will be lost in a queue generates concerns over the possible consequences of being late for subsequent activities. Hence cues regarding expected waiting time reduce stress and uncertainty and, it has been alleged, cause customers to feel more comfortable and thus to interpret the waiting period as "reasonable" (see Hui and Tse, 1996 for a review of relevant literature). Key indicators of likely waiting time are the number of people in a queue and how many goods are in their shopping trolleys, signs of the likelihood of lengthy credit card transactions or form-filling activities, and the observed speed of work of the employee in charge of a checkout. Note how the observed length of an existing queue can be misleading vis-a-vis the actual waiting period: being 12th in line may raise less concern in a customer than his or her mental calculation that it will take a cashier (say) 15 minutes to process a queue of six customers each carrying a large volume of purchases. The frustrationexperienced through having to wait for a longer time in the former situation might be far greater than in the latter. Other influences on customer acceptance of checkout delays include the degree to which checkout staff appear busy (slow-moving staff serving long queues can generate intense customer frustration); and whether the customer has spent a lot of money, regards his or her purchases as higher quality or lower cost than available at alternative supermarkets, or has taken a long time selecting purchases (Larson, 1987; Maister, 1985).

The previous discussion ignores the possibility that waiting could be associated with positive psychological sensations, analogous perhaps with the feelings of warmth and sociability experienced at a jam-packed party, or the excitement felt at being a member of a crowd at a big football match. Kostecki (1996) noted how the need to queue could even be regarded as an indicator of a store's attractiveness. The individual may assume that because a store is extremely busy it must be good, otherwise large numbers of people would not have been drawn into it. Arguably, the bottlenecks created by supermarket checkouts have the effect of generating a "crowd atmosphere" which actually encourages customer purchases. The sight of long checkout queues, Kostecki suggested, provides the prospective customer with information about the calibre of

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