The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports on a former math teacher who claims to solved the question "Which checkout line up will be fastest?"
In a nutshell he has concluded that the number of people in the lineup is more important than the number of items a person has in their cart.
The critical factor, he says, is the average of 41 seconds that it takes a shopper to pay the cashier and engage in idle chit chat.
So a long line of people in the Express line, with two or three items each, will actual move slower than the checkout with one guy with a full shopping cart.
YMMV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19 2016, @03:40AM
I ran into just that the other week.
They were running a special on cream of something soup, so I stocked up.
On their Mix-and-match,-Buy-5-to-get-the-special-price deal, my cooking oil rang up at the reduced price (even though I didn't buy 5 of those) but the soup rang up at the regular price.
...then i had to wait behind someone at the service desk.
So, yeah.
.
Heh. Back when I worked in a grocery store, ALL of the prices were entered with buttons on the cash register.
The afternoon there was a power outage, the manager broke out the cranks that fit into those electro-mechanical registers and the cashiers kept right on going.
I don't think that would fly these days.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]