[mikecsh]

This always seems intuitive to me. You see a single queue feeding multiple processors fairly often such as in banks and security queues at airports. They seem "fairer" to me as you are not disadvantaged by picking the "wrong" queue through a bad prediction. In a classic supermarket queuing scenario, you could pick the shortest queue but find that the person in front is incredibly slow, so the three people who came to checkout after you at other checkouts progress through the process faster. This is first come, first served.