People spend billions of hours a year waiting in lines. It all began in Britain during World Wars I and II and passed...

среда, 17 марта 2010

19:59

Silverstona

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УчёбаPeople spend billions of hours a year waiting in lines. It all began in Britain during World Wars I and II and passed on to the United States, Canada and parts of Europe, developing rules that sociologists, psychologists and economists have recently been studying.

In Europe, the most common kinds of lines in railroad stations and banks are what are known as multi-server queues, where each serving counter has a separate waiting line. In contrast, over the last decade US banks, railroads, airlines and some fast-food restaurants have switched over to what is known as the ‘snake’ line, where all counters are served by one single-file line.

The difference is not efficiency. It’s fairness. In the multi-server system, a costumer lucky enough to pick a fast line can get served ahead of someone who had been waiting longer in a slower line.

It is not how long you have to wait that bothers you, it is how long you think you had to wait. This seemingly obvious principle was recently confirmed by one researcher. He timed how long each of 640 people stood in a grocery store checkout lines. Then he asked all of them how long they thought they had waited. On average, the study showed that perceptions of the waiting period were about 30 percent longer than the real waiting time.

Such research can be used to mislead the public. Some businesses have discovered that they can improve customer satisfaction by concentrating as much or more on reducing perceived waiting time than on reducing actual waiting time. Thus in the 1950s, when high-rise hotels and office buildings began to get persistent complaints about waiting times for elevators, they did not speed up the elevators. They simply put large mirrors next to the elevator doors so that people were too busy smartening up their appearance to notice how long they were waiting.

A more modern example comes from Houston airport, where a major airline recently got a series of complaints about how long they had to wait to pick up their bags. The airline discovered that the supposedly objectionable wait was about eight minutes - exactly the industry average.

Why the unhappiness? Arriving passengers, the airline discovered, had only a one-minute walk to get to either the exit or the luggage carousel. Those with luggage then had to wait another seven minutes to get to their bags – which meant they had to watch as everyone who didn’t check any baggage got an earlier start on the business day.

The airline didn’t hire more baggage handlers. To deal with the complaints it simply began parking its airplanes at the other end of the terminal, so that everyone walked seven minutes, and those who checked bags only had to wait an additional minute to get them. The complaints stopped.

Researchers at City University have also looked at the effects of queue-jumping by pushing into 129 lines around New York. What they found what that the person most likely to object was the one directly behind the intruder, and that even though people standing three or four places further back are inconvenienced just as much, they rarely protest.

@темы: учёба

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