4 ms·
It works for employees, but only when you care about latency and the employees are interchangeable. A classic queueing example is tellers at a bank. One teller
by Cerium 4y ago
It works for employees, but only when you care about latency and the employees are interchangeable. A classic queueing example is tellers at a bank. One teller and the line is awful because of one complex transaction. Two and you are in and out in a minute.
- RyanHamilton 4y agohttps://ryanhcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/index.png https://ryanhcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/index.png
- ggm 4y agobank with one queue and two tellers. two queues and two tellers can introduce frustrations, when one queue advances but the other doesn't and social pressure forbids head-of-line queue jumping.
- dghlsakjg 4y agoMy local grocery store is like this. They never seem to have enough cashiers, and instead of having a single line served by many cashiers like most stores in the area, you just have to pick your line and hope it works out. They normally only have two registers open, too. So it is abundantly clear when someone has managed to get ahead of you. No idea why this in particular drives me so nuts
- ggm 4y agoI think we situationally judge "fair queue" by two rules. 1) did my queue block? if so, its "unfair" your queue moves but I was ahead of you 2) if somebody jumps ahead of me, even if I am aware they were in another queue before me, I feel like I've been cheated
- noxvilleza 4y agoThere's also some subconscious effect - you rarely remember when queues are fair to you, but you always remember when you get 'queue-screwed'.
- lostcolony 4y agoI'm the same way, and I'll tell you why. Because people are greedy assholes. There have been multiple times I've been in a place where there was one line, and then someone, coming in, seeing that one line, feeding into two or more registers/whatever, decides to go create a new line. The employees don't care who walks up to their register, and no one initially cares to make a big deal about it...but then you get a few more people who show up, think there's two lines, and voila, now there -are- two lines. Unless the store makes it impossible for more than one line to form, you'll end up with one line per register/whatever.
- skybrian 4y agoSeems like the places that make it work have a long aisle fenced by store shelves so it's very obvious.
- ggm 4y agoThis works for sure. Is this what techies call "head of line blocking" being solved?
- lostcolony 4y agoYep; but for some reason there are still stores being laid out where that isn't happening. Nearly every grocery store, Target, Costco, etc, that I've seen has per register lines. Even the relatively newly built that I've seen, they still set up per register lines.
- drewzero1 4y agoEverywhere around here has one line per register. At the beginning of social distancing one large local store built a barricade and enforced a single line so people weren't standing so close together. I went there once during that time and the line wrapped a quarter of the way around the store, ending over in the freezer department. It went faster than it looked, but that store also tends to have enough checkouts open and staffed with efficient, motivated workers.
- xxs 4y ago> doesn't and social pressure forbids head-of-line This is a horrid implementation of a work queue or any queuing in general. You have a multiple workers (tellers) and a single queue - the rest is a dumb design. The other option is work stealing but the example would not work so well with a bank and tellers. Virtually all banks around here use ticketing system with different queue, effectively a priority queue with multiple workers.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> two queues and two tellers can introduce frustrations, when one queue advances but the other doesn't That's not the main problem. If each teller has their own queue, you just have the one teller / one queue problem twice. Instead of having nearly no queue time, you'll have lots of queue time in each queue.