Washington - If the people who study the psychology of waiting in line - yes, there is such a thing - have an origin story, it's this:
It was the 1950s, and a high-rise office building in New York had a problem. The tenants complained of an excessively long wait for the elevator when people arrived in the morning, took their lunch break, and left at night. Engineers examined the building and determined that nothing could be done to speed up the service.
Desperate to keep his tenants, the building manager turned to his staff for suggestions. One employee noted that people were probably just bored, and recommended installing floor-to-ceiling mirrors near the elevators, so people could look at themselves and each other while waiting. This was done, and complaints dropped to nearly zero.
It's a tale that appears in books and articles about organisational design, though it's not clear whether it's a real story or simply a parable. Regardless, the story offers a powerful insight into one of the most universal, and universally hated, things we do: waiting in line. It suggests there are hidden and surprising factors that affect how we experience queues.
In the case of elevators, it wasn't the wait that mattered. It was that we got bored while waiting.
While that story has become legend, it was not the first time people started thinking seriously about queueing. A Danish engineer named AK Erlang developed the first mathematical models of how lines worked in the early 20th century to complement a new device at the time: the telephone.
Erlang's work helped the phone company figure out how many phone lines and operators the old-fashioned central switchboard needed to keep customers from waiting too long. He used probability and statistics to model how bottlenecks form as customers arrive, and how quickly companies need to provide service to keep queues moving. His work inspired the next generation of mathematicians and engineers to take up the subject.
In those early days, engineers were focused solely on efficiency - how to serve as many customers as possible without cutting into a company's profits. It wasn't until 50 years later that researchers began to realise that there were subtler factors influencing people's experience of waiting in queues, including ideas of fairness, mismanaged expectations, and the strange way that most people perceive both time and pain.
Interestingly, it turns out that what you hate most about queues likely isn't the length of the wait after all.
The time that people spend queueing, and how they feel when they do so, is a big deal for average people and the economy.
Altogether, some people spend a year or two of their lives waiting in line, estimates Richard Larson, a professor who studies queuing theory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This back-of-the envelope calculation includes less obvious types of queues, like driving in slower-than-normal traffic during a daily commute.
And the way that businesses manage queues results in easily billions of dollars of gained and lost brand equity and consumer spending. A long and unpleasant wait can damage a customer's view of a brand, cause people to leave a line or not enter it in the first place (what researchers respectively call “reneging” and “balking”), or discourage them from coming back entirely.
Companies have come up with some novel solutions to shorten lines, including charging customers for skipping or advancing in the line. Examples include priority boarding on airplanes and Disney's FastPass, which allows you to make reservations for rides at its parks.
These new technologies seem to be cutting down on the amount of time spent waiting in line, though they are unlikely to get rid of waiting altogether.
Even so, businesses can still do a lot to improve customer experiences. As numerous studies show, how people feel when they wait in line often matters a lot more than the duration of the wait.
One strategy that companies can use is distraction. Research suggests that people who have nothing to do perceive wait times to be longer than those who are distracted by reading materials, TV, or conversation. Mirrors by the elevator, TV screens at the airport, magazines in the waiting room, little knick-knacks to peruse and buy in the supermarket check-out aisle and, of course, smartphones, all take people's minds off their frustration about being in a queue.
Larson of MIT says Disney is the undisputed master of this technique, designing queues that are entertaining and create anticipation for the ride. The line for one Toy Story-themed ride, for example, features giant murals, oversized toys, and a 1.5m animatronic Mr Potato Head, who entertains those waiting.
“In my book, they're No 1 in the psychology and in the physics of queues,” Larson says of Disney. The design is so successful that parents with young children can happily stand in line for an hour for a four-minute ride - a pretty remarkable feat, he points out. And, of course, the capacity of the line and the ride are carefully calculated to balance customer satisfaction with profits.
It remains to be seen whether products like Disney's FastPass, which allows customers to pay to skip lengthy lines for amusements, will end up aggravating everyone else. But so far, Disney's strategy appears to be working fine. Disney's parks continue to set visitor records.
One other powerful technique that Disney exemplifies is managing people's expectations for the wait. It often gives estimates for how long someone might spend standing in a queue for its rides, and these wait times are almost always overestimated, according to Larson's research. Even if the wait time is extensive - an hour, for example - people are pleasantly surprised when they exit the queue in 45 minutes, “ahead of schedule”.
Estimated wait times also help to defuse the anxiety, stress and uncertainty that people experience, which research suggests are the most common problems with queueing. This anxiety gets especially acute when you can't see or monitor the queue - which is why many customer phone hotlines these days will tell you how many people are waiting in front of you.
Have you ever noticed that many of the queues you encounter in daily life are one of two main types?
Some businesses have many parallel queues that consumers have to choose between - for example, the queues that typically form behind grocery checkout counters, or the lines of cars at toll booths. Others have one long, serpentine queue that everyone waits in, and when you reach the front of the queue you are served by the next available register.
The systems each have advantages and disadvantages. The biggest obstacle to adopting the serpentine queue is that you need floor space where the queue can form. Queues can snake around the entire store, blocking customers' access to the shelves. Some companies also find they need a manager or system to organise the process.
What about the amount of time each queue takes? According to Larson, if both systems are working efficiently, the mean wait time is about the same. However, the variance is larger for the parallel queue system than for the single serpentine queue - meaning that you could be served very quickly, or have a very long delay.
In practice, the system of many parallel queues also gives rise to inefficiencies - like when customers don't notice that one checkout counter is open - which slows down service. “So, the many-line system can never have a mean queue time less than that of a single-line system,” says Larson.
If you do run into a long delay in the parallel queue system, that experience is going to be particularly annoying and memorable, especially if you only have a few items in your trolley.
Research on the psychology of queueing suggests that people have a tolerance for waiting that is proportional to the complexity or quantity of service that they themselves anticipate. In simpler language, if you have a trolley of groceries, you won't mind as much if the person in front of you has one, too. But if you're just buying a few things, their preparation for the end times is likely to annoy you - which is why most supermarkets also have express lanes.
Larson and other queue researchers argue that the single, serpentine line has other, more important advantages. Namely, it seems socially fairer, because customers who arrive first are always served first. Because people waiting in queues often value fairness more than efficiency, studies have shown that serpentine queues make customers happier than parallel queues, regardless of the wait time.
That guarantee of fairness eliminates a lot of stress and anxiety. You might not think about it much, but a system of many parallel queues, like at a supermarket checkout or toll booths, can be very anxiety-provoking. There's the stress of choosing the shortest line, and then there's the possibility that, for unforeseen reasons, your queue will grind to a halt.
These queues tend to lead to what Larson calls “slips and skips”, where people who enter the line first watch those who arrived later overtake them. He says these generate a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, and “the victim experiences more psychological loss than the perpetrator enjoys benefit”. (Those relatively painful experiences end up being more memorable than the relatively painless ones - one reason it seems like the other queue “always moves faster”.)
Many companies made the switch to one serpentine queue to “get rid of the stress of queue calculus”, as Larson says.
Another important factor is the speed and pacing of the queue. Research by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist whose work sparked a broad rethinking in economics, argues that consumers waiting in a queue experience a dual response: they become gradually demoralised as they wait, but have a positive response to each forward movement of the queue. Their overall feeling about the experience depends on how these two responses balance out.
Other research by Kahneman suggests that the way we remember a queue is heavily influenced by how the experience ends. A queue that starts slow and speeds up is very different, and psychologically preferable, from waiting in a queue that starts fast and then slows to a crawl.
As research suggests, our experience of waiting in a queue is all about perception, and that can be easily manipulated.
Larson agrees that how we feel about waiting in a queue is often an issue of perspective. He points out that, when people go out to a movie and then dinner with friends, some could see the hours spent in a cinema watching a movie as essentially “being in queue for dinner”.
“So if you're a really negative person you say, I'm in a queue for hours'. I mean, a really negative person would say I'm in a queue for death',” Larson says. “So a lot of it is a matter of attitude.”
The Washington Post