Supermarket checkout lines

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WYNCOTE, Pa. | Police: Shooting followed dispute in Walmart checkout lines

WYNCOTE, Pa.  — A man pulled a gun during a dispute with another customer in Walmart checkout lines near Philadelphia and opened fire, wounding several people before fleeing but was later arrested after crashing into a police vehicle, police said Tuesday night.

All victims sustained non-life-threatening injuries in the gunfire reported just after 6 p.m. Tuesday in the crowded store at the Cedarbrook Plaza Shopping Center, Cheltenham Township Chief of Police John Frye said.

Frye said the gunfire started after some type of altercation between customers in separate lines near the cash register, when “words were exchanged” and the suspect pulled a gun from his female companion’s waistband and fired “at least 10 shots.”

Two women in their 40s and a man in his 40s were wounded in the legs and another person had a graze wound, while a fifth person later went to a hospital with unspecified injuries. In addition, a pregnant woman was taken to the hospital after a fall, he said. Frye said it wasn’t immediately clear whether the person the man was arguing with was among the victims.

The male suspect and his female companion fled, tossing the gun from the car, but then ran into a police vehicle. Two officers whose vehicle was rear-ended were taken to hospitals along with the woman in the suspect’s car, while the male suspect was also arrested after being hit with a stun gun when he tried to break the window of the police vehicle, a Philadelphia police spokesman said. The officers, suspect and female passenger were in stable condition, he said.

Frye called the shooting a “very dangerous situation,” given that it was a “very crowded Walmart, a lot of shots were low, the floor is hard … there’s a risk of ricochet.” Reports from the hospital, he said, indicate that the suspected shooter was “definitely on some type of drugs.”

More than 22 police departments responded to the scene, Frye said. A SWAT team was checking the store and others in the complex and Walmart employees remained inside for their safety and to allow police to interview them, he said.

A Walmart representative didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment.

The Revolutionary Musings of an Optimistic Cashier

There is a young man who I’ll call Walter who works at one of the local big box discount stores. He is cheerful and friendly, talks to people with ease, injecting humor into his brief interactions with customers.

On this particular morning, I maneuvered around the store, finding the large palettes filled with cases of bottled water. My wife prefers the bottled water they sell here because it has…

By Christopher Mele, NY Times, Sept. 7, 2016

You dash into the supermarket for a few necessities. You figure it will be 10 minutes--tops--before you are done and on your way home.

Then you get to the checkout lanes and they are brimming with shoppers. Your plan for a quick exit begins to evaporate.

But all is not lost.

For anyone who has ever had to stand in line (or if you are a New Yorker, you stand on line) at a supermarket, retailer, bank or anywhere else, here are some tips from experts for picking the line that will move the fastest.

Get behind a shopper who has a full cart. That may seem counterintuitive, but data tell a different story, said Dan Meyer, a former high school math teacher who is the chief academic officer at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology and learning.

“Every person requires a fixed amount of time to say hello, pay, say goodbye and clear out of the lane,” he said in an email. His research found all of that takes an average of 41 seconds per person and items to be rung up take about three seconds each.

That means getting in line with numerous people who have fewer things can be a poor choice.

Think of it this way: One person with 100 items to be rung up will take an average of almost six minutes to process. If you get in a line with four people who each have 20 items, it will take an average of nearly seven minutes.

Those minutes add up. Richard Larson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is considered the foremost expert on queues, estimated that Americans spend 37 billion hours a year waiting in lines.

Go left for faster service. Robert Samuel, founder of Same Ole Line Dudes, a New York-based service that will stand in line for you, said in an email that most people are right-handed and tend to veer to the right.

Look for female cashiers. “This may seem sexist, but I prefer female cashiers,” Mr. Samuel wrote. “In my experience they seem to be the most expedient at register transactions and processing.”

Study the customers ahead and what they are buying. It is not just the number of people ahead of you, but their age and what they are buying that can make a difference, Professor Marsden said. Older people will take a bit longer because they can have difficulties that delay the checkout process, such as not understanding how a debit card works, she said.

Also consider the number of different items they are buying, Professor Larson said. Six bottles of the same soda will go faster than six totally different items, some of which cannot be scanned, such as vegetables, he said.

If you have no irregular items, such as produce, use a self-service checkout, Mr. Meyer said. “You’ll lose the human contact but gain time,” he said.

Choose a single line that leads to several cashiers. Not all lines are structured this way, but research has largely shown that this approach, known as a serpentine line, is the fastest. The person at the head of the line goes to the first available window in a system often seen at airports or banks.

Getting into a single line also provides a sense of psychological relief because it eliminates the choice of where to go and second-guessing about the best line to choose, said Julie Niederhoff, an assistant professor of supply chain management at Syracuse University.

Still, most people prefer to take their chances with parallel lines--individual lines dedicated to a single cashier--even though most of the time they end up picking a slower line, Professor Marsden said.

Douglas E. Norton, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Villanova University, said studies had typically shown that with three tellers, each serving his or her own line of customers, the wait time was three times longer on average than a single line leading to an array of tellers.

Beware of lines with obstructions. If you find yourself in a line that snakes around a corner or where the cashier’s view of the number of customers is obstructed by a wall or a shelf, be prepared for a longer wait, one study found. The study, released in June, noted that obstructions hinder the feedback cashiers get from seeing how their work thins the line.

What can you do to speed up service?

Mr. Samuel recommended:

• Always face bar codes toward the cashier. • When buying clothes, remove the hangers and pull the tags out for easy scanning. • Use the buddy system at the express lanes. Split the items so you each stay within the maximum number allowed and then get out the door quicker.

Remember: A lot of the waiting game is mental. To some degree, waiting is all in your head. Research has found that, on average, people overestimated how long they waited in a line by 36 percent.

The psychology of queuing has also found that waits seem shorter when you are distracted. Professor Norton recommended talking to the person next to you or reading the magazines in the store’s racks.