Supermarkets have separate queues for each till. Airports and banks mostly use one long queue feeding several desks. The second is better, and the reason is a small piece of mathematics with a large effect.
With separate queues, each queue has its own luck. One till gets a customer with a complicated problem and stops; the others move. A person who chose the wrong line waits far longer than average, and everyone has experienced this and remembers it. With a single queue, one slow transaction delays everyone slightly instead of delaying a few people enormously.
The average waiting time is similar in both systems. What changes is the variation, and variation is what people actually mind. Research on queueing consistently finds that an unpredictable wait feels substantially longer than a predictable one of the same length, and that the sense of unfairness — watching a later arrival be served first — is one of the strongest sources of complaint.
Supermarkets know this and mostly keep separate queues anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with waiting. A single long queue looks intimidating from the door, discourages people from entering, and takes up floor space that holds goods.
The case is a useful reminder that a system is often optimised for something other than the thing you are standing in it for.
Từ vựng trong bài
- separate /ˈsɛpɚˌeɪt/ — riêng biệt
- queue /ˈkju/ — hàng chờ
- feed /ˈfid/ — dòng tin
- reason /ɹˈizən/ — lý do
- customer /ˈkʌstəmɚ/ — khách hàng
- average /ˈævɚɪdʒ/ — giá trị trung bình
- experience /ɪkˈspɪɹiəns/ — kinh nghiệm, trải nghiệm
- transaction /tɹænˈzækʃən/ — giao dịch
- delay /dɪˈleɪ/ — sự chậm trễ
- instead of /ˌɪnˈstɛd ˈʌv/ — thay vì