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I meant for the customer, and while I agree that grocery stores don't care about deadweight loss for their customers, I think they could. I think the chief reason line length is considered noise rather than signal is because it's so unpredictable. When it's known, people do a great deal to minimize their time spent in line. They go to the store at off hours; they switch lines once they're standing in them. I know my local Taco Bell gets a lot more business from me because of their speedy response time, vs. the teriyaki place next door that I like more, but takes forever. And my college's bookstore has had a great deal of success with putting live camera feeds of their lines (or lack thereof) on their website. But with grocery stores, I couldn't really tell you which of the two grocery stores in my area would have a longer line. They're about the same, and that's close enough. So you'd need a pretty big delta for line length to become a differentiating factor between stores. The current system of a cashier scanning items individually probably won't see drastic efficiency improvements without drastic changes, so...drastic changes are needed. After a certain point, changes in "line length" become "presence or absence of a line at all." As jonnathanson says below, electronic scan-as-you-buy is probably the future there(Smith's, in answer to my cousin's email inquiry, mentioned they were testing a portable bar code scanner). I'm under the impression that grocery stores have pretty cruddy margins, so maybe I shouldn't read that much into "in testing." If anyone out there is dying for a startup idea, I think this one is worth a look. (Before you say it, I'm working on another project, and my cousin left for grad school.) Since few things are more self-satisfying than sailing out of a store without waiting in line, maybe Whole Foods will be the first? ;) |