Queuing

Queuing is mere conformity; you cannot have legal proceedings brought against you for not queuing. But everyone does it and lots of people complain about the length of queues and the amount of time it takes to get served in whichever shop you’re in. It is an aspect of shopping that has been instilled in society and cannot be removed, you will find a miniscule proportion of society willing to be non-conformist and ignore this basic courtesy.

The irritation with supermarkets is that they have, let’s say, 15 checkouts that can be manned by employees and at least another six that are now self-service (god-forbid we are not given the option of avoiding all human contact) but not all of the checkouts are open all the time. This means that those that are open have queues of people at them and yet the supermarkets refuse to open more tills. This has a negative effect on the customers because they become frustrated with the wait and their opinion of the supermarket drops.

The creation of self-service checkouts have, in theory, lead to decreased time spent in supermarkets. They have replaced those tills that used to cause great aggravation for those aware of correct grammar usage and have signs that said “10 items or less” but they have become so popular with those that are just popping into supermarkets for one or two items that often they have longer queues than normal checkouts and so customers will opt to spend more time waiting in a queue in order to avoid speaking with another human. This is contradictory to the earlier sentiment that people are irritated by the prospect of queuing but is no less true; priorities have shifted.

Additionally, self-service checkouts have proven to cause more problems for shoppers as their over-sensitivity and generic phrases frustrate customers and leave them standing next to their items with a red light flashing above their head waiting for the assistant to finish with the previous customer (who had the same problem) and swipe their card to instruct the machine to behave. Hearing ‘unidentified item in the bagging area’ ten times in a twelve item shop is enough to put anyone off using the self-service checkouts, and yet, the queues continue to be excessively long.

For more information on the customer service offered in supermarkets such as Asda, contact their head office customer services department and speak with one of their friendly and helpful employees.