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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 21, 2018

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REAL LIFE NEWS: SCIENCE SAYS YOU SHOULDN’T SWITCH QUEUES

by Hazed

British people are supposed to love queuing. The stereotype is that we’ll join a queue even if we don’t know what it’s for. Actually, I think the truth is that we realise queueing is the fairest way of ensuring people get served in the order they arrived! That’s why we get annoyed when people jump the queue or push in. It’s guaranteed to make us tut.

That’s all very well when there is just one queue, but if there are several queues all moving at different rates, like in a supermarket, it can get frustrating. It’s tempting to switch queues if you see one that’s moving faster than yours. But new research shows that it is not a good idea.

Researchers at Harvard Business School wanted to find out what prompted people to switch queues, and whether it was worth it. They discovered that the thing that is most likely to make you switch was being at the back of a queue. If there’s nobody behind you, you are twice as likely to switch – even though doing so means you end up waiting longer to get served.

“It’s nuts because the number of people behind you has nothing to do with how long you are going to wait, but it shapes our behaviour,” said Ryan Buell, an expert in service management who led the research. “If we are in last place, we are almost 20% less satisfied than if someone is behind us.”

Buell worked with economists on a phenomenon called “last place aversion”. This is the discomfort people feel when they know that they earn less than others in a group, or are at the bottom of a social pecking order for some reason. Nobody likes to be the last in a list of any kind.

He started to observe how people behave in a grocery store that has multiple checkouts, and then set up an online survey which he could use as a behavioural study. Participants in the study were told it would take about five minutes. Actually, it only took a minute, but when they logged in they were forced to wait in a virtual queue, with their place displayed on the screen. They started at the back, and were given the option to wait, switch to a second queue, or choose to leave.

About one in five people chose to switch, impatient at the wait. But switching meant they ended up waiting 10% longer than if they had stayed. Some people switched for a second time and then had to wait 67% times longer.

Buell explained: “When we join a queue, we tend to make the most rational choice we can, which usually means joining the shortest queue. But if we see a line moving faster, we might switch without having enough extra information, and we can often get it wrong.”

Ok, so clearly you shouldn’t switch queues. Maybe read the paper while you wait or something!

But the research has implications for the organisations serving customers, as well as those waiting in line. Buell says that they ignore everyone except the person at the front of the queue – when being at the back is the most unpleasant place to be. If they want to stop people giving up and leaving, coffee shops could start serving people right away, he suggests, by taking their order as soon as they join the queue.

In an unpublished working paper on the research, Buell notes that people tend to feel most unhappy at the back of a queue for the first 10 seconds or so, after which the misery subsides. “Remember that the person in front of you was last until you arrived, so someone will show up if you hang around long enough,” he said.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/27/back-to-front-why-switching-queues-will-get-you-nowehere-faster

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