The definition of a waiting line is a list of consumers who continues to wait to pay for a specific service from a restaurant or other service facilities. The way I see it understanding waiting lines and figuring out how to manage them is one of the most important areas in operation management. In companies or in private life, there are instances of procedures which generates waiting lines or queues. The reason why these waiting lines occur is for the present services facility is inadequate to provide service at that instance. As an examples when people travel by airplanes, I have personal involvements with numerous types of waiting lines or queues. To buy tickets for a movie, I normally have to stand in line at movie theater ticket office. When I arrive at an airport most of the time I stand in line to check baggage, then I stand in line again to get a seat assignment. After that I line up again for the TSA security checkpoint and the again for the last time when waiting to board the plane to scan the boarding passes. I also wait when I am inside the plane, I wait for those ahead of me to take their seats. And finally, we may wait for baggage to arrive and then for ground transportation. I think this quote is very important and says a lot about waiting lines. “Perhaps the biggest influence on our feelings about lines, though, has to do with our perception of fairness. When it comes to lines, the universally acknowledged standard is first come first served: any deviation is, to most, a mark of iniquity and can lead to violent queue rage. Last month a man was stabbed at a Maryland post office by a fellow customer who mistakenly thought he’d cut in line. Professor Larson calls these unwelcome intrusions “slips” and “skips.” (Stone). The main objective of lines is basically to lessen total costs. There are two main groups of cost in a queuing situation the first one is cost of customer waiting for a service, two is the expense of the service capacity. The expense of a consumer waiting in line consist of the wages paid to workers while they wait for services like waiting for delivery driver that brings food, also any harm of business due to consumer declining to wait and more than likely going to another store and not paying for my stores goods. The expense of service capacity contains, the number of point of sale at a supermarket, the number of repairs people to handle equipment to breakdowns and so on can be well-defined as the expenses of upholding the capacity to produce service.
I think that stores that this quote is very helpful with all different types of wait lines and how fast passes are useful in some situations. “The long lines at theme parks are a continual source of irritation for visitors. The Walt Disney Co. theme parks offer a “Fastpass” system for customers (or guests) that reserves a one-hour window at a specified time, letting the guests bypass the line during that period. Any guest can use this service, but a person can hold only one pass at a time (although numerous Web sites offer advice on how to beat the system). The Fastpass could be seen as unfair, because some guests are allowed to bypass the normal waiting line. But people who are waiting in the longer, regular line do not feel cheated, because they know that they too could have chosen a Fastpass for that ride. Many are holding a Fastpass to a different attraction and are in this line while waiting for the assigned time on their Fastpass. The critical feature that makes this fair is that everyone is entitled to use it.” (Norman). That quote has a lot of good points I think a lot more companies should use a similar fast pass maybe not exactly like that but maybe if people signup and pay for faster checkout at like wholefoods or something like that it would make so people that hate lines could avoid them and make the process faster.
If I was a restaurant manager I would have a few different ways to manage lines at my restaurant. One idea would be this quote from Handbook of hospitality operations, “A study by Groth and Gilliland surveyed 135 customers of two fast food stores- one with a single wait line and the other with multiple lines. They found no difference in actual wait times, but those in the single line system perceived their wait times to be shorter”. (Jones, 2008). The ideas from this information is very helpful since in my restaurant I would diffidently use a Single-Channel, Single-Phase Queue since what the customer perceives is more important than what is actually faster. My wait management strategies would use diverting customer style by offering them other things to do while they wait like if they want to sit at the bar and get a drink while they wait. The other thing I would do is ask for their cellphone number and tell them when there table is ready I we will send them a text message. The thing I would try to do is make the perceived wait time to be very short but in reality it is about the same if not longer. The way I would manage the arrival patterns is I would plan about when I am expecting large volumes like dinner time and lunch time to plan accordingly.
I think that wait line management is very important if people want to be successful in the hospitability industry. The reasons they exist is to manage the cost and time. There is many different types of wait lines that can vary from the different type of restaurants or other hospitality venues. Wait line management is very difficult and if it is done right I think it can be very impressive.

Works sited

Stone, A. (2012, August 18). Why Waiting Is Torture. Retrieved March 2, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting-in-line-is-torture.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Norman, D. (2009, July 1). Designing Waits That Work. Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/designing-waits-that-work/

Jones, P. (2008). Waiting Lines and self-service. In Handbook of hospitality operations and IT(p. 98). Oxford, UK: Butterworth Heinemann.