Queues, customer characteristics and policies for managing waiting‐lines in supermarkets

Shoppers leaving four supermarket outlets (two in one of London’s most prosperous boroughs and two in London’s poorest) were questioned about their attitudes towards having to wait in queues, including express checkout lines. The list of interview questions incorporated items designed to assess whether customers possessed Type A or Type B personality traits. It emerged that although Type A inclination did help explain certain shoppers’ perspectives on waiting‐in‐line, customers’ locations in either a rich or a poor neighbourhood and their subjective evaluations of whether their families were better‐off or worse‐off than other families in the area were more influential as determinants of attitudes concerning queues.