A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket
By MICHAEL BARBARO Published: June 23, 2007 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/business/23checkout.html Starbucks at 9 a.m.? Eight minutes, head to the next one down the street. Duane Reade at
6 p.m.? Twelve minutes, come back in the morning.
But now a relative newcomer to Manhattan is trying to teach the locals a new rule of living: the longer the line, the shorter the wait.
Come again?
For its first stores here, Whole Foods, the gourmet supermarket, directs customers to form serpentine single lines that feed into a passel of cash registers.
Banks have used a similar system for decades. But supermarkets, fearing a long line will scare off shoppers, have generally favored the one-line-per-register system.
By 7 p.m. on a weeknight, the lines at each of the four Whole Foods stores in Manhattan can be 50 deep, but they zip along faster than most lines with 10 shoppers.
Because people stand in the same line, waiting for a register to become available, there are no “slow” lines, delayed by a coupon-counting customer or languid cashier. And since Whole Foods charges premium prices for its organic fare, it can afford to staff dozens of registers, making the line move even faster.
“No way,” is how Maggie Fitzgerald recalled her first reaction to the line at the Whole
Foods in Columbus Circle. For weeks, Ms. Fitzgerald, 26, would not shop there alone, assigning a friend to fill a grocery cart while she stood in line.
When she discovered the wait was about 4 minutes, rather than 20, she began shopping by herself, and found it faster than her old supermarket.
“By now,” Ms. Fitzgerald said of those competitors, “you’d think everyone else would catch onto this.”
The science of keeping lines moving, known as queue management, is a big deal to big business. Since arriving in 2001, Whole Foods