Queuing in supermarkets is all part of the shopping experience but how much does it matter ? Do people actually go to a different supermarket if their experience is negative?
Throughout our lifetime, we'll spend about four years in queues. That's longer than most people spend exercising. So here's a thought. Why not kill two birds with one stone and do a little jogging on the spot? Maybe a star jump or two, or even try to get a line dance going?
But it's the other sort of queue jumping that often gets us into a hot sweat and creates problems for supermarkets. So you might be interested to hear of findings regarding people's reactions to queue jumpers. What impact does it have when someone doesn't go to the back of the queue but, rather, infiltrates the middle or even the start of the queue?
American psychologist Stanley Milgram had researchers join queues at 129 different supermarkets, betting shops and railway stations across New York. At each one his assistants entered the queue between the third and fourth person, saying in a neutral tone: "Excuse me, I'd like to get in here." Then they simply faced forward and only left the queue when admonished.
Even in the rough, tough neighbourhoods of the Big Apple, people's reactions were pretty meek. Only one in 10 queue-jumpers were physically ejected from the line, and only half received any kind of negative reaction at all. This included dirty looks or lewd hand gestures as well as actual verbal objections. When Milgram doubled the number of queue jumpers to two the rate of objections also virtually doubled. But they still didn't get ejected.
So then he tried introducing a 'buffer'. That's someone already standing in line who allows the queue jumper to get in front of them. In these cases objections dropped as low as 5% - the line would have to be 20 people long before one person complained.
People don't mind queuing providing it's 'fair'. In the larger post offices we now have one queue and an announcer who tells us which desk to go to. But in supermarkets shoppers calculate their decision of which checkout queue will be quickest - and we all hate it when we guess wrong. We don't say anything - like the folk in Milgram's experiment - but we think badly of the supermarkets for not making it fairer. Why isn't there a system where at busy times they help people find the right queue? Because they don't think it's important enough. And because shoppers don't complain. n
Professor Philip Hesketh is a professional speaker on the psychology of persuasion and author of the Amazon number one bestselling book, Life's a Game so Fix the Odds.
www.heskethtalking.com
Throughout our lifetime, we'll spend about four years in queues. That's longer than most people spend exercising. So here's a thought. Why not kill two birds with one stone and do a little jogging on the spot? Maybe a star jump or two, or even try to get a line dance going?
But it's the other sort of queue jumping that often gets us into a hot sweat and creates problems for supermarkets. So you might be interested to hear of findings regarding people's reactions to queue jumpers. What impact does it have when someone doesn't go to the back of the queue but, rather, infiltrates the middle or even the start of the queue?
American psychologist Stanley Milgram had researchers join queues at 129 different supermarkets, betting shops and railway stations across New York. At each one his assistants entered the queue between the third and fourth person, saying in a neutral tone: "Excuse me, I'd like to get in here." Then they simply faced forward and only left the queue when admonished.
Even in the rough, tough neighbourhoods of the Big Apple, people's reactions were pretty meek. Only one in 10 queue-jumpers were physically ejected from the line, and only half received any kind of negative reaction at all. This included dirty looks or lewd hand gestures as well as actual verbal objections. When Milgram doubled the number of queue jumpers to two the rate of objections also virtually doubled. But they still didn't get ejected.
So then he tried introducing a 'buffer'. That's someone already standing in line who allows the queue jumper to get in front of them. In these cases objections dropped as low as 5% - the line would have to be 20 people long before one person complained.
People don't mind queuing providing it's 'fair'. In the larger post offices we now have one queue and an announcer who tells us which desk to go to. But in supermarkets shoppers calculate their decision of which checkout queue will be quickest - and we all hate it when we guess wrong. We don't say anything - like the folk in Milgram's experiment - but we think badly of the supermarkets for not making it fairer. Why isn't there a system where at busy times they help people find the right queue? Because they don't think it's important enough. And because shoppers don't complain. n
Professor Philip Hesketh is a professional speaker on the psychology of persuasion and author of the Amazon number one bestselling book, Life's a Game so Fix the Odds.
www.heskethtalking.com
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