[saalweachter]

I know that's like a formulaic crack, but the last time I was at the DMV, I did wait like 2.5 hours ... because there were a huge number of people being served by a small number of people.

That's what efficiency looks like. Each transaction took a small amount of time, the clerks processed each one efficiently and had little downtime between them. Each clerk was maximally utilized, and the DMV was fully utilized all day.

A DMV where you could walk into at any time and a clerk was available to help you immediately would be incredibly inefficient: it would have too many clerks who were being paid to stand there not working. Convenient, yes, efficient, no.