Large retail stores and fast-food restaurants have a simple choice when designing their checkout customer experience:

• Multiple registers, multiple lines, one line per register
• Multiple registers, single line

This problem is known in the retail industry as “queue management”. The New York Times today features an article comparing the checkout experiences of several New York City supermarkets, and concludes that Whole Foods’s single-line approach is the most efficient. The article suggests that the multiple-line approach is common in the suburbs, but that a different approach is needed for Whole Foods’s New York stores… so a “single-line, bank-style system was quickly chosen for its statistical efficiency.”

Um, duh. Don’t we all know this yet? Isn’t this common knowledge. Isn’t it just common sense? Well, apparently a lot of retailers haven’t yet gotten it.

But customers know it.

Lately I’ve noticed that when presented with multiple registers, customers (at least in New York City) will naturally form into a single line when given half a chance, even when store policy doesn’t ask for a single line. Maybe it’s because it just seems rude to slide up to an open register when somebody else is already waiting in line behind another customer at another register. It’s taking advantage of another person’s bad luck or complacency.

In fact, the multiple-line system almost deliberately encourages people to treat each other as rivals, asking them to think hard before choosing a line, to make tactical decisions to switch lines to maximize their own efficiency, even to send spouses and children to “hold places” in multiple lines to hedge their bets… all of this adds up to a kind of laissez-faire capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest model of the customer experience. In short, these stores are making the customers do their queue management for them.

This system is not only statistically inefficient, but (more importantly) it is a bad customer experience on an emotional level. It implicitly treats customers as animals, like pigs at a trough fighting for food. While some customers may complete their checkout happily, others will feel screwed because they chose the wrong line, or because they didn’t quickly switch to a more efficient line at the right time. It alienates customers from each other, too, by forcing them to focus on tactics and not on normal social niceties, which can’t be good for the store’s sense of community.

In short, the multiple-line system lacks grace. Customers want to be polite and social, not rude and anti-social. We feel better about our experiences when they don’t bring out the worst in us. We want experiences that enable us to behave graciously.

I can’t believe this is still subject to debate, but many retailers are sticking to their guns. In the local CVS and McDonald’s stores near my office, whenever the customers naturally and politely queue up into a single line the staff has to step in and practically yell at them to break up and form separate lines.

Why do they do this? Is it because, as the Times article suggests, customers are scared by long lines and, presumably, can be fooled into thinking that 10 lines with 5 people in each is a far shorter wait than 1 line with 50 people in it? Is it because of space/design constraints? Is it in order to better discipline and monitor unskilled cashiers? Is it because in many communities customers don’t yet understand the mechanics of the single-line approach? Or is it just plain old corporate inertia and stupidity?

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A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the emergence of technology boom towns, and other geographic and economic factors.

The dominant architectural style of this new growth has an overt “country” look, a kind of caricature of 19th century quaint Americana: gabled roofs, whitewashed siding, twisting rolling streets with absurdly Anglophilic names like “Greyswallow Terrace” and “Cedarpost Square” (names obviously generated by a computer program, as they have absolutely no relevance to the actual landscape or history of their location), plenty of grassland (although, generally, a sad lack of trees). They stretch across the landscape as far as the eye can see, and the consistency of their style strongly evokes the conformity of the 1950’s Levittown housing model.

Sometimes they are single-family standalone dwellings (”McMansions“, the fatter and more ostentatious cousin of what I’m talking about here), sometimes they are multiple-unit buildings with a single-family façade. Occasionally these “homes” (they never call them “houses”, always “homes”) will have a slightly-urban “townhouse” feel, with splotches of red brick and perfunctory sidewalks, but even these units will generally be topped off with the requisite white siding and pointed roofs.

The general style seems, I think, to be a hybrid of the country estate and the urban housing project, marrying the illusion of landed aristocratic luxury with the logistical efficiency of cookie-cutter subsidized apartment life.

Unfailingly, this housing trend always reminds me of the movie Back to the Future Part II. MORE…

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Johannes Brahms, clearly pissed off at Avery Fisher Hall. How is it possible that New York’s most dedicated Brahms lovers can excuse Lincoln Center?

A couple of nights ago I went to see a concert of chamber music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, on one of the final nights of the Mostly Mozart festival. (Just for the record, I’m not a big classical music concertgoer and I generally don’t know what I’m talking about, but my wife and brother in law have for years been great about helping me learn and appreciate classical music more and more.)

All of the performances were excellent as far as I could tell, but the final peice, a Brahms sextet, was what all three of us were really looking forward to.

Sadly — and shockingly — the Brahms was utterly unlistenable due to a nearly-constant and totally mysterious high-pitched ringing sound that marred nearly every note from the beginning to the end of the peice. The sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, as if it were simply part of the space itself or coming from the rafters above. It would generally, but not always, coincide with an energetic violin phrase or a loud segment of music. And since the peice was dominated by the violins, the noise was present to some degree for (I would estimate) nearly a third of the peice’s entire duration.

When the noise first started, I glanced around to see what it was (assuming it was someone’s cell phone), and the first thing I noticed was the hearing aid in the ear of the gentleman sitting next to me. But the sound didn’t seem to come from the hearing aid — it was coming from everywhere at once. This wasn’t some subtle easily-ignored sound, either. It sounded like someone’s wristwatch alarm or cell phone was going off every five seconds. Or more like a hundred people’s wristwatches were going off, all very quietly but adding up to something quite substantial.

I wondered if it was just me, something screwed up with my ears. And yet I noticed a similar discomfort in the faces of my wife and brother-in-law sitting next to me. The three of us kept glancing at each other with pained looks every time the noises resumed, in perfect synch. It wasn’t just me. MORE…

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In the middle of New York City — literally, in the very middle of the 5 boroughs — there is a little island that most New Yorkers know nothing about.

Within a couple hundred yards of the skyscrapers of Wall Street — and a couple hundred feet from the docks of Red Hook, Brooklyn (where I live) — there are hundreds of acres of open grassland, picturesque tree-lined thoroughfares, rows of yellow clapboard mansions and Victorian brick townhomes, a 9-hole golf course and a half dozen baseball diamonds, a panopticon-style prison, and an 18th-century fort complete with a moat.

My father grew up here, on Governor’s Island, which was until the 1966 an active Army base (and a Coast Guard base until 1994). My grandfather, Lt. Col. John J. Fahey, was the Inspector General of the 1st Army, and he and his young family were stationed there in the mid and late 1950’s. My family has always spoken of Governor’s Island with a deep fondness — my grandmother especially would recall the ferry rides to Manhattan with my young father and uncle, and their visits to the big city from the idyllic quiet of their island home.

50 years later — last weekend — my father and uncle came to New York for an Army brats’ reunion visit to Governor’s Island, and we tagged along (and took lots of photos).
MORE…

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One year ago, the New York Police Department started a program to randomly search the bags of commuters as they enter New York’s subway stations. The program basically puts a couple of police officers next to the turnstiles, where they randomly select passengers to subject to a search.

My subway station seems to be an NYPD favorite - they’re stationed there about twice a month, which from anecdotal evidence from friends in other neighborhoods seems to be extremely frequent. I’ve always told myself that if they tried to stop me, that I would refuse, leave the station, and walk five blocks to the next stop and get on there.

They’ve never stopped me, however. Until this morning.

And I’m proud to say that, although I was risking running late for a meeting, I immediately said “No. I am going to walk up the block to the next station.”. Then I turned around and walked away. It’s easy to see how a bad guy could do the same thing.

I bear no resentment towards the cops on this: they’re just doing their jobs, and I suspect that they don’t really beleive that their time is well spent on this clearly porous security tactic. They didn’t hassle me at all (which they’d have no right to do, as refusing a random search is my right). But I hope that they at least report the event to their superiors in order to deliver the message that this tactic is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer dollars.

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