I was in a fairly sizeable supermarket today, standing in the line to pay for my two items, barely larger than a Mentos and a lollipop, and I must've dozed off or something; because at one moment I noticed everything around me was shrinking and when I perceived myself to be the size of a small mountain, it hit me. The grand question even Hamlet couldn't have thunk of: ~Why Do We Need Queues?~ Not only that, I was also very appropriately struck with a fantastic answer to that question. First off, I am aware that the etiquette of standing in a store line varies by region and that in some cultures (notably southern ones) it is often a means of meeting your future mate, or simply discovering what is happening in the world. Also, some cultures have the beautiful habit of allowing people to take your place before them if you have fewer items to pay for than they do. However, I'd say when I go to a supermarket I usually spend at least five to ten minutes standing in a line - sometimes up to twenty -, building, slowly, a brick wall inside my head to block out the light coming in through my eyesockets. Some stores also have self-service areas where you yourself can beep your goods and pay for them, feeling useful like a small child. I imagine you'd need at least one person to constantly monitor the self-service clientelle lest they pocket something. Well, I have an answer to all of that; here's how it works: you remove all tills from the store and instead you add a room with no windows. This room has a number of entraces accessible from the shopping area through which carts full of tasty goods are pushed in return for a slip of paper with a number on it (much like in banks and such). Inside the room with no windows a number of people (I will refrain from mentioning any particular kind of people here; besides, that also varies by region - although in my neighbourhood it seems to be standard that people servicing customers are mostly women) are hard at work and repackage the stuff the customers have carefully chosen. These goods are then placed at one of the exits at the other end of the room with no windows. These exits open to a lounge area where happy customers sit back, buy snacks and drink pina coladas while their selection is being processed. Since they can actually move around, they'll be open to spending more money and since they know roughly how long it's going to take for their stuff to come out of the room with no windows (er, linear predicion), they can make educated choices as to what to do with their spare time. If there are a lot of customers and the wait time is long, they could go further shopping in smaller nearby stores. Once their stuff comes to the exit area, they pay for it, heavy iron bars lift, their goods are moved a bit closer from being just barely out of grasp, and the customer, happy as hell, can go home. Now, I know the consumer market works on the principle 'no queues = more profit'. But that just isn't reality. So here are a few of the up-sides of my Nobel Economics Prize worthy idea: - no queues (or rather, the herd effect is simply taken out of the equation) - there are confetti, coffee and ice cream stalls in the lounge, generating additional profit while the customers are waiting. people can sit down and read a newspaper of watch a movie. - people can socialize in the meantime and possibly go to their car, small shops or take a shower (depending on the wait time, which can be approximated fairly well) - the dispensing areas could store the goods for the customers while they go for a longer stroll, not forcing them to carry their stuff along - this applies to several northern societies: shoppers wouldn't need to see the clerks' suicidal faces - ditto: clerks wouldn't need to force a fake smile at total strangers and read (and immediately ignore) a script written on the side of the till: #1 say hi, #2 wait for a bonus card and don't do anything before the customer finds it because that would be efficient, #3 say thank you and smile in a way that scares small children, #4 offer the customer the cheque knowing damn well almost nobody wants it Well, at least I think it'd be a great idea...

I like it! Where do I sign?

While the concept is already better than waiting in a line, it still has the wasting-my-time factor for something that should be instantaneous (even though the wasting would admittedly be more comfortable).

My take on this issue: put a short range addressable RFID tag on every product packaging and use an RFID reader with extremely high discrimination capability at the checkout that can individually recognize all products in your cart. Basically you would just push your cart through a reader portal when leaving the store, the total price would be displayed almost instantaneously, you pay and you're out. A matter of seconds.

Technically, that's probably already doable.

I quite like this, actually. Kind of like shopping online except you pick your goods up in person instead of delivery.

This system kind of already exists (think Argos - you order your stuff and a lackey gets it for you, although you're still queueing to get to the desk to order it and you then have to queue to pick it up), although a completely transparent system would be great whereby, as you say, you can do your own thing and come back to pick it up.

Oh, and Tesco can go and fuck themselves. Just because I say I'm happy to pack my own bags is *not* an excuse to fling my shopping at me at 100mph out of sheer undiluted spite. Aresholes, only reason I shop there is because Sainsbury's is bloody miles away, I don't have a car and they won't deliver to my post code.

Your system would actually solve the supermarket problem overnight. No need to deal with screaming children stumbling in front of your trolley and charging around, no need to deal with people dumping their trollies right in front of the one thing you actually need, no need to get tempted by special offers only to find yourself £1bn over budget for the week. It's nice to get out of the house and go to the supermarket for a change of scene, but it has its drawbacks.

Sainsbury's were partly there with their Self-Scan system (don't know if they still use it, been that long since I've shopped there). Essentially, you get a little barcode gun and you scan your purchases as you pick them up. At the checkout, you hand over the gun and that gets scanned instead of each item so it's so much quicker. Unfortunately, it sometimes went a bit screwy and the cashier had to rescan everything which could take ages depending on how much stuff you'd got.

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
Your system would actually solve the supermarket problem overnight. No need to deal with screaming children stumbling in front of your trolley and charging around, no need to deal with people dumping their trollies right in front of the one thing you actually need, no need to get tempted by special offers only to find yourself £1bn over budget for the week. It's nice to get out of the house and go to the supermarket for a change of scene, but it has its drawbacks.

I don't understand why it would solve any of those problems.

The RFID thing would be sweet though. I can't imagine it would be hugely expensive to add to a project. Most expensive part would be installing new readers, but if you implanted the chip and kept a UPC for a while then it would work either way.

Yann - I think the main factor with the RFID idea would be something similar to how HD digital projection systems have been added to cinemas - it's happening, but no one's in a hurry to waste money on it because it doesn't come cheap and at this time it really doesn't generate additional profit (eg, if the RFID system can undercut the salaries spent on workers doing the job, only then would it become viable; not before). How much would the tags cost? Would they be environmentally disposable? And what about hand-selected stuff like onions or coco nuts for your pina colada?

One of the considerations I skipped over (somewhat on purpose) is that supermarkets want to keep you in the store for as long as possible because of, as ukdeveloper already mentioned, these very same special offers and audio commercials. I've personally written stuff for these audio commercials and I did some research into them - it's a special breed of brainwashing and the store really is Big Brother in that respect (did you see this episode of Mind Control with Derren Brown where he had everyone to raise their hands in a train station by simply using the intercom? That's no joke - people really do respond to this stuff. And it bypasses your filters, which is why you go £1bn over budget ;) ).

I'd like to hear people's takes on the downsides of the OP, though, because I'm sure there are several which I'm not considering.

This would be good in theory, but would see profit margins for supermarkets drop like a stone.

1. Operating costs would most likely jump a little. Now customers wouldn't be coming to the employees to just quickly toss their stuff over a scanner and collect cash, now they have to process a list, walk through a storehouse and gather everything.

2. Customer purchase rates would drop significantly. Most people don't accept the number of stuff that they buy simply because they see it as they're walking through the store. And there is the reason why they don't put milk and bread right beside the front doors.

It also limits the customer's ability to shop and would suck for any perishable products.

I'd rather go hunt for my own food. In a supermarket.

Something is not helping my urge to kill though, It's the automated tills. OK, it's handy when you are in a hurry, but it already reduces already low social interactions by, oh... at least 80%. They could at least go the whole hog, and replace the charming till ladies by some android doing the scanning, packing, and providing casual conversations, now I would be impressed (maybe in Wonderland Japan).

Anyway, It's funny to think that gathering food could be considered a pointless time-wasting process. On average, I'd say I spend around a max 20 minutes shopping a day, I imagine Mr Neanderthal spent a bit more of his time finding his sustenance. That could be why they are extinct.

I think you guys misunderstood the point, oliii and Talroth - what I was suggesting is that everything remains the same, only the checkout routine is made transparent by getting rid of the actual queues. You still hunt for your own food and there'd be little to no overhead for the supermarket.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
I think you guys misunderstood the point, oliii and Talroth - what I was suggesting is that everything remains the same, only the checkout routine is made transparent by getting rid of the actual queues. You still hunt for your own food and there'd be little to no overhead for the supermarket.

Cool!

I have a better solution. It's called home deliveries! Order a Mars bar online, have it delivered through your letterbox in less than 5 minutes.