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Supermarkets are at the cutting edge of the queue
management industry. With big money to be made
and lots of other supermarkets available nearby for
impatient shoppers put off by long till queues a lot of
money is invested in getting it right. Sir Terry Leahy,
former chief executive of Tesco, the UK’s largest
grocery chain, claimed that thermal imaging cameras
which monitor how many human beings are in the
store at any given time, were a key factor in raising
annual pre-tax profits to more than £2000 billion.
So if you want to protest against unfair supermarket
price promotions, wear tin foil underwear!
A young girl on the till at the big new Sainsburys at
Hythe in Kent told me she is under instructions to
scan twenty items a minute but I cannot pack twenty
items a minute. So does that reduce the stress of
supermarket shopping by speeding up the queue
or does it just shift the irritation of waiting in the
queue away from the supermarket and onto the
hapless shopper struggling to stuff twenty items a
minute into bags with the only alternative the dread
horror of the humiliating screech of
unidentified item
in the bagging area
over at the self-service tills.
I’m going to stick with the High Street shops.
The Holy Wimbledon Queue
Every year for more than a century, the Wimbledon
tennis championships have attracted more would-be
spectators than the grounds can hold.
As far back as
1927 the queues began at 5.00am and over 2000
people were turned away. Each year by the people
waiting to attend the Championships create a
hallowed space - this surely is the Cathedral of the
British Queue. Honorary Stewards, like vergers,
oversee a quintessentially English code of conduct
with crystal clear rules, which expressly forbid the
blasphemy of using objects and items in lieu of one’s
physical presence. At the football perhaps but at the
Championships – no never! The Wimbledon Tennis
Museum even includes an exhibition about the queue.
Look out for our new Wimbledon Tour coming soon.
New Queues
In a strange twist of fate just when it seemed that not
only are queues at the Post Office soon to be a thing
of the past but with the internet selling everything one
could ever want or need perhaps the Post Office itself
might soon be a thing of the past the growing internet
trade is actually increasing Post Office visits. The
brown paper parcel is making quite a comeback as