The Psychology of Waiting Lines

In the Operations Management class at Chicago Booth, Prof. Dan Adelman from U of C introduced to us an interesting paper written almost 30 years ago, about the waiting lines that forms in a general situation such as before the customs in the airport, famous restaurants, social security offices, etc. I read it during my flight back to Chicago and felt worth while to bring it up here. The article is also available in the web for free, linked below.
http://davidmaister.com/articles/5/52/
Before the author goes into the details of queues, he clearly articulates one formula, which we all intuitively know but at least I have never tried to put it that way. He says,

S=P-E

where, S, P, and E represents satisfaction, perception, and expectation. 

This clearly articulates that going to a five-star restaurant may not always be a good idea since you are setting up E to the maximum high. If you are trying to maximize your customer satisfaction, there are two levers, one is of course to set P high, doing good work, producing better quality products and so forth, but the other is to try to control your customers expectations to a fair level. When a collage classmate boy who is always fooling around like a loser suddenly becomes serious and starts to talk with passion about how much he loves you, that's the time you'll fall in love with the (many times wrong) guy. Lowering expectation is a valid strategy to generate the gap of satisfaction.

Then follows the 8 principals of waiting which are self-explanatory by their titles.

1. Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time
2. Pre-process waits feel longer than in-process waits
3. Anxiety makes wait seem longer
4. Uncertain waits are longer than known, finite waits
5. Unexplained waits are longer than explained waits
6. Unfair waits are longer than equitable waits
7. the more valuable the service, the longer I will wait
8. Solo waiting feels longer than group waiting

I will recommend you go into the article at this point not only because the contents are useful but the text is amusing and attractive.

At the beginning of the article the author quotes the that-time ad copy of Fedex as "Waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time consuming and incredibly expensive." Nevertheless, I would like to also think about the utility side of the queues. In Japan some people are really crazy about Ra-men (the Chinese noodle soup) and they never mind waiting in the back of the long line for hours to get to that bowl of pleasure. The length of the queue is considered as a signal of the quality of the restaurant, and even if you are not a big Ra-men fan, you will be pretty hesitant to go into a Ra-men shop without a queue in even if it is lunch time. Therefore there is a famous tactic named after the Japanese national flower, "Sakura"; typically when you open a restaurant you would like to ask your friends or relatives to come sit in and try your food to make it look crowded; you might even want to pay for them to come.