Please don’t make me wait; open some *%&^ cash registers

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO ​

Hurry up. Get to the next sentence. Time’s a wastin’. 
We’re a nation in a hurry, and we don’t want to wait. We don’t want to wait in traffic, and we don’t want to spend time on hold on the phone.
And we especially don’t want to wait on line in the grocery store.
Almost one in four people in a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll picked the grocery checkout as the line where their patience is most likely to run out. 
“If you ask the typical person, ‘Do you feel more time-poor or money-poor?’ the answer almost always is time-poor,” says Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, a New York-based research firm. “We walk in the door with the clock ticking with various degrees of loudness in our heads. And if I get to the checkout and if I have the perception it’s not working efficiently, often that clock gets even louder.”

​See? Like everything, it’s all about perception. And I think big stores hurt their own cause when they build 20 to 40 checkout stands at the front of the store but then only consistently staff a few. 
So even if your wait is actually short, you spend the whole time you’re waiting thinking, “Why don’t they just open another register?”
It happens to me every single time I go to an extremely large home-improvement store in Wilmington. There’s a line of perfectly functional cash registers, but only two are open: one at the service desk and one in tools. 
One day I waited a long time there with a couple of older men standing behind me, complaining about the line to each other, amusing me so much that the time actually seemed to pass quicker. 
“I don’t know why they waste all that space with those registers,” one said. 
“I know it. They never have those open anyway,” the other replied.
“You’d think they could sell a lot more product if they just turned those registers into shelves,” the first one said.
Exactly.
I know that businesses cut their costs by keeping down the number of personnel hours they must pay. But they may not fully understand the sales they lose from disgruntled customers who don’t want to wait.
Half of those in the AP-Ipsos poll said they refuse to return to businesses that made them wait too long. And 15 minutes, respondents say, is the max they will wait in line.
In a small town, though, the choices are limited, and you find yourself back in a store you swore you’d never patronize again. 
Still, you can find locally owned small businesses that don’t have line problems. Or you can use the self-checkout stands, if a store has them. You can even order your groceries online and have them delivered.
Along with grocery stores, the Department of Motor Vehicles lines and those at the post office are among the top spots where Americans hate to wait. I try to avoid the post office lines by timing my visits just right, although I usually do curse the post office location as I drive the labyrinthine path, way past the beautiful old (conveniently located) post office building, to the new one, back behind the main road and far from any residential neighborhood.
In the grand scheme of things, it gets you nowhere to work yourself into a lather while waiting in line. I don’t know if it’s my years of shopping for fun, or my time spent in the South, where patience truly is a virtue, but I can usually amuse myself while standing on line.
And I’ll never forget the time I was waiting in a tiny North Carolina store/gas station/restaurant during the lunch rush (for a fried pimiento-cheese sandwich, no less) and an elderly farmer, his stomach growling, finally spoke up: “Could you kindly give me a glass of water so that I’ll have the stamina to make it to Hardee’s?”