HOUSTON – Americans spend an astounding 37 billion hours a year waiting in lines. That is time you could be making dinner, pulling your child's Halloween costume together or sleeping. It's why we are always looking for which line or lane will move the quickest. Consumer expert Amy Davis found some tricks to help you choose the fastest lane at the grocery store.
A New York Times article (hyperlink to: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/business/how-to-pick-the-fastest-line-at-the-supermarket.html) recently offered tips for choosing the fastest line at the supermarket. We took it a step further and tested those recommendations to see if they really will get you out of the grocery store faster.
You are in the grocery store at least once a week. How long you are there depends on a lot of variables.
"Some checkers are faster than others," explained one shopper.
But researchers say by simply observing you can choose the quickest line. At Kroger stores, the goal is to never have more than one person waiting in a lane behind the one person currently being checked out. Cashiers are graded on efficiency. Monitors in stores work with sensors that count customers as they walk into the store. Based on the average time it takes someone to shop, the monitors help managers determine how many lanes need to be open to reach the store's goal.
For example, a monitor might read "There are 3 lanes open now; but in 30 minutes the store will need 5 lanes open to keep things moving."
If there are multiple customers in each lane, researchers say you should get behind the shopper with a full cart. They say the time it takes cashiers to greet each new shopper with just a few items in their basket and then process their payments will take longer than ringing up one person with more items. And they claim you can pick the fastest cashier just by looking at them. One line expert says female cashiers are faster.
Kroger played along to let Channel 2 test these theories. We brought three interns to the Buffalo Speedway store. Brittany and Vanessa filled their carts with 15 items each.
Robert put 30 items in his cart. They wheeled their baskets to two separate lanes. Brittany and Vanessa went to a lane with a female cashier.
Robert went a lane with a male checker. We timed the transactions.
The lane with Robert's basket of 30 items moved faster than the lane with Vanessa and Brittany, each with half the amount of groceries. That tip panned out.
It did not hold true that female cashiers are faster. In our test, the male cashier rang up Robert a full minute and 13 seconds faster than the female cashier rang up the same number of items in two customers' carts.
How much produce shoppers have in their carts can make a difference, too, because it usually takes longer to ring up than items with bar codes. And if someone has a lot of the same items in their cart, you know that will move faster than a full cart of a bunch of different stuff.