Tips to zip through supermarkets
Experts provide advice to help choose the fastest checkout line
You dash into the supermarket for a few necessities. You figure it will be 10 minutes — tops — before you are done and on your way home.
Then you get to the checkout lanes and they are brimming with shoppers. Your plan for a quick exit begins to evaporate.
But all is not lost. Experts say it’s possible to pick the line that will move the fastest.
For starters, get behind a shopper who has a full cart. That may seem counterintuitive, but data tell a different story, said Dan Meyer, a former high school math teacher who is the chief academic officer at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology and learning.
“Every person requires a fixed amount of time to say hello, pay, say goodbye and clear out of the lane,” he said in an email.
His research found all of that takes an average of 41 seconds per person, while items to be rung in take about three seconds each. That means getting in line with numerous people who have fewer things can be a poor choice.
Think of it this way: One person with 100 items to be rung in will take an average of almost six minutes to process. If you get in a line with four people who each have 20 items, it will take an average of nearly seven minutes.
Next, go left for faster service. Robert Samuel, founder of Same Ole Line Dudes, a New York-based service that stands in line for customers, said in an email that most people are right-handed and tend to veer to the right.
Experts also advise looking for female cashiers. “This may seem sexist, but I prefer female cashiers,” Samuel wrote. “In my experience, they seem to be the most expedient at register transactions and processing.”
A.J. Marsden, an assistant professor of human services and psychology at Beacon College in Leesburg, Fla., suggested checking to see if a cashier was talkative and commenting on every item being scanned. If so, avoid their line “unless there is no one in that line, in which case, just deal with the chatty cashier,” she said in an email.
It’s also a good idea to study the customers ahead and what they are buying. It’s not just the number of people ahead of you, but their age and what they are buying that can make a difference, Marsden said. (For instance, some older people might take a bit longer because they can have difficulties that delay the checkout process, she said.)
Larson also recommends looking at the number of different items they are buying. Six bottles of the same soda will go faster than six totally different items, some of which cannot be scanned, such as vegetables, he said.
If you have no irregular items, such as produce, use a self-service checkout, Meyer said.
“You’ll lose the human contact but gain time,” he said.
If possible, also choose a single line that leads to several cashiers. Not all lines are structured this way, and usually not at supermarkets. But research has largely shown that this approach — known as a serpentine line — is the fastest. The person at the head of the line goes to the first available window in a system often seen at airports or banks.
Getting into a single line also provides a sense of psychological relief because it eliminates the choice of where to go and second-guessing about the best line to choose, said Julie Niederhoff, an assistant professor of supply-chain management at Syracuse University.
Still, most people prefer to take their chances with parallel lines — individual lines dedicated to a single cashier — even though most of the time they end up picking a slower line, Marsden said.
Douglas E. Norton, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Villanova University, said studies have typically shown that with three tellers, each serving his or her own line of customers, the wait time is three times longer on average than a single line leading to an array of tellers.
So why is the less efficient parallel line model used at grocery stores?
“Essentially, nobody wants a huge line of folks with full grocery carts winding (like a serpent) around their store,” he said in an email.
In addition to that, beware of lines with obstructions. If you find yourself in a line that snakes around a corner or where the cashier’s view of the number of customers is obstructed by a wall or a shelf, be prepared for a longer wait, one study found.
The study, released in June, noted that obstructions hinder the feedback cashiers get from seeing how their work thins the line.
You can also help yourself out to a certain extent. For instance, Samuel recommends always facing a product’s bar code toward the cashier; when buying clothes, remove the hangers and pull the tags out on top for easy scanning. And if you’re shopping with a friend, use a buddy system at the express lanes — split your items so you each stay within the maximum number allowed and then get out the door quicker.
To some degree, waiting is all in your head. Research has found that, on average, people overestimated how long they waited in a line by 36 per cent.
Customers are more concerned with how long a line is than how fast it moves, according to research by Ziv Carmon of the business school INSEAD and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University.
Given a choice between a slowmoving short line and a fast-moving long one, people will often opt for the short line, even if the waits are identical.
The psychology of queuing has also found that waits seem shorter when you are distracted. Norton recommended talking to the person next to you or reading the magazines in the store’s racks.
“And try to lose the idea that you are cursed,” he said. “If you remembered the times when it actually went smoothly, you would probably realize that it evens out in the long run.”