How To Choose The Fastest Shopping Line
Everyone hates waiting in line. So we've developed a formula to find the fastest line in a supermarket. Don't stand in line for longer than you have to!
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Science says the average person spends 15 years of their life in a queue. This is very bad. I've worked closely with VideoJug to develop a patented queue speed formula. Watch closely and I will explain why Q = (s+d+f+w)cx, so you will always join the fastest queue.
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Step 1:
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Amount of items
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The Speed of the queue is governed by the number of items passing through the checkout, more than the number of shoppers in the queue. So, a long queue of shoppers with few items vill move faster than a short queue with many items.
For the purposes of the queue-speed formula, we take the average number of items.
Divide the total number of items (a) by the number of shoppers (b) to reach x - the average number of items. The lower this number the better.
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Step 2:
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The shoppers
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Observe the characters in the queue before committing to queue in the queue.
The family shopper is fast but harassed, often with lots and lots of shopping. Assess the contents of the trolley and estimate the number of children in the family. Do this for each of family shopper in the queue. Take the average. This is (f).
The single man is fast unless he stops to chat up a pretty female cashier. Watch out though - the man cannot multi-task. He has to pack, then pay. With lots of shopping, this makes them slow.
Because of this, each single man counts for one and a half units - so count the number of them in the queue and multiply by 1.5. this is (s).
Old people are slow and they talk a lot. Watch out if the cashier is chatty. Old people also pay a lot with cash which is fiddly for their old person fingers.
Rate how doddery each old lady in queue is out of 10, where 1 is sprightly and 10 is nearly dead. Then take the average across the whole queue - this is (d).
Workers on their lunch are very fast. They buy small items and pay quickly with no chit-chat. Their speed gives them a rating of 0.5, so count the number in the queue and divide by 2. This is (w).
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Step 3:
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The cashier
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The cashier is in charge of the queue, so watch them carefully before committing to queue in the queue.
The more experienced the cashier the faster the queue.
A young cashier holds up the queue with silly questions and mistakes. Also the underage cashier cannot sell alcohol, so have to ask their supervisor. This makes them slow. Watch the cashier and estimate experience out of 10. this is (e).
A chatty cashier makes old people slow. See how talkative they are, and rate out of 10. Multiply this by the number of old people in the queue. The final number is (t).
A pretty female cashier make single men slow. Watch out. If there are single men in queue, rate attractiveness out 10. this is (a). If there are no single men in queue, (a) is 1.
The female cashier is faster because the man cannot multitask. But the experienced man is faster than the inexperienced female. G is 1 if cashier is female, 2 if they are male.
From these estimations we can calculate C, the final rating for the cashier, with the simple formula c = (g*vta)/e.
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Step 4:
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The formula
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So you have to choose of two queues. The first queue has one sprightly old lady with 10 items, one family shopper with 40 items and cashier who is a fairly experienced male, but very talkative. Because there is old lady in queue we multiply t by 1.
Two shoppers and 50 items give us an average of 25.
Queue 2 is lengthy, with 4 workers on lunch with 3 items each, and 2 single men with 10 items. The cashier is a pretty female but quiet and inexperienced. The average items per person is 5.3 recurring.
First we find c. Remember: c = (g*vta)/e, so for queue 1,
(2*v1*9)/6, which is the same as 2*3/6, or 6/6, which is 1.
For queue 2 we have (1*v7*2)/2, or v14/2, which is roughly 1.9.
Note how the prettiness and the inexperience make the cashier slow. This is unfortunate.
Now we can run whole formula.
Remember, Q=(s+d+f+w)cx.
So for queue 1, Q = (0+2+3+0)*1*25. This is the same as 5*25 which gives us a queue speed rating of 100.
This is quite slow - ideally we are wanting Q rating of less than 50.
For queue 2, we have Q = (2+ 0 + 0 + 2)*1.9*5.3 = 50.35
So we can predict that the sheer weight of shopping makes the first queue slower, even though the second queue is longer. So in this instance we should choose the second queue.
Of course, there are certain random variables which affect the outcome of this formula. they include the fiddly typing of the bar code when the scanner doesn't work, the person going back to pick up the buy-one-get-one-free offer, the person who can't find their wallet, the person buying with vouchers, the person whose card doesn't work, the cashier changing the till roll, the person getting the cash back...
With careful observation and some detailed note-taking, you can apply this formula in any situation, thereby reducing the stress of the queuing procedure.
