Efficiency in all forms
My fiancee and I saw a movie tonight at the 66th street Loew’s (it was The Losers, and it was pretty damn entertaining). Because she had some coupons we had to stand in line for the box office. Now, we haven’t bought movie tickets from a human in months, if not years. Usually the box office consists of one attendant and one line, which translates to a long line. The best solution involves bringing in another attendant (i.e., create a multi-server queue). That alone can increase throughput incredibly by smoothing variation (slow transaction sticks up one ticket point, the other keeps moving). No such luck with the extra attendent tonight, but our ticket taker did a fantastic job of making every second count. As soon as one person’s tickets started printing, he called the next in line over to begin their order, saving about 10-15 seconds per order (each of which took about 40 seconds).
That’s huge.
And all he did was make use of the time normally spent waiting for tickets to print. A small tweak, but made for a 25-30% faster transaction. When you’ve got no help and people are waiting, every little bit matters.
