Operations researcher Dr. Richard C. Larson is the Director of the Center for Advanced Educational Services and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Larson is the author of numerous studies on the mathematics and psychology of waiting. He has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Boston Globe. He was the subject of a segment on queueing on the ABC program 20/20.
Top 10 Tips
Following are INFORMS's top 10 tips for beating holiday shopping lines:
- Use catalogues and/or the Internet whenever possible and thereby avoid lines completely! Currently, you can now buy almost anything on the web: books, music CDs, airline tickets (sometimes at big discounts), videos, clothes, antiques, and even cars.
- Get there at the opening or near the closing, but avoid midday "shopping rush hours."
- Be savvy at finding a parking space. In general, go to the section of the parking lot that is as far as possible from the most popular entrance. If all spaces are filled, "take ownership" of a lane by "live parking" at the end and waiting for a car to depart.
- Make each trip to the mall multi-purpose, with several gift purchases planned. Then, when you reach a store that is busy, go to the next one on your list, and return to the congested one later when, presumably, it is less crowded
- Reduce or eliminate purchases from stores that make you stand in two or more lines for a single purchase. An example of a store to avoid is one that has one line for a point of purchase transaction and another for delivering the sales slip to the "warehouse," which must then locate and give you the product. Stores with this practice don't value their customer's time.
- Favor stores that merge all queues into one serpentine line rather than stores that queue customers separately in parallel lines. Parallel lines require shoppers to play stressful games of "queue calculus" to guess which line will move fastest. Queue calculus has mostly losing players!
- If you're shopping in a department store, assemble as many purchases as possible for one point of sale transaction. For instance, in the men's section, bring all the men's gifts you plan to purchase to one register a single time, and get it all over with at once. That may reduce the number of queue experiences you have from three or four or more to one.
- If you must join a gift-wrap line, arrange to wrap all your purchases at one time. If possible, find something creative to do or something delicious to eat while your purchases are being wrapped.
- Leave plenty of time to mail your presents from the post office or other provider. Don't wait for the widely publicized last day "guaranteed" pre-Christmas delivery. Avoid Saturday morning and lunch hour trips to the post office.
- Buy supplies early! Purchase stamps, wrapping paper, tape, and all the ancillaries you will need both for mailing and helping Santa well before the time you'll need them. Avoid the need to buy these materials on Dec. 24!
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.