“Supermarket lines may not be the longest, just the most loathed,” writes Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal (8/19/09). In fact, a study conducted two years ago in 25 U.S. cities found that shoppers waited five minutes, on average, at supermarket checkouts…
A result is that shoppers usually think they’ve been waiting much longer in grocery lines than they actually have. One study found that “customers overestimated waiting time by over 50 percent.”
Express lanes don’t necessarily help matters because they make a show out of rewarding their least valuable customers.
By the way, the slowest average grocery-store waiting time, at 8 minutes, 23 seconds, is in Washington, D.C….
