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by keithg 5301 days ago
Back in 1989 as one of our projects in a data structures course, we solved this problem and reached the same conclusions. We did it using Pascal!
1 comments

There are other factors which aren't typically considered. The latency of someone walking from the head of the single queue to the cashier each time matters, especially if the person at the front isn't alert or is confused by trying to figure out which till to go to. People are smart enough to pick short queues to join and there is no latency. Also psychology, nobody wants to join a long queue even if it moves fast, they go to another store.