Waiting in Line: The Business of Queuing
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The science and psychology of the queue. This week Evan and his guests look at how businesses manage queuing.
We're often told that queuing is one of those quintessential British habits which embodies our sense of fair play: that we should wait our turn. Despite technological innovation. queuing remains one of those unavoidable things we all have to do: be that on-line, waiting for a bus or to pay for our groceries at the check-out. But what does it mean for businesses? How do they go about managing queues and our expectations of those as customers?
Producer: Jim Frank.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this program. In this edition of the bottom line, Evan Davis and |
| 0:04.8 | guests discuss the science and psychology of the queue. How do companies manage the daily business |
| 0:10.9 | of us waiting in line? Hello and welcome to the program and I'm not going to waste any time |
| 0:16.9 | getting down to business today because our subject is queuing. We endure an average of about |
| 0:22.8 | five and a half hours in queues each month, according to some research in 2013 at least, and it turns out |
| 0:29.2 | the management of queues involves advanced science and psychology. We'll hear a bit about both |
| 0:35.3 | and we'll ask pertinent questions like, does it pay, to have self-service checkouts at supermarkets? |
| 0:41.6 | Needless to say, getting waiting times down is of huge benefit to companies, to customers, and to the public sector. |
| 0:48.2 | So, what is an efficiently managed queue? |
| 0:51.8 | With me today are three people who spend a long time thinking and working on these |
| 0:55.3 | things, so let's meet them. And my first guest is... Cashier number three, please. Terry Green, |
| 1:02.0 | forgive us for playing that, but you're the man, the man behind that voice, aren't you? |
| 1:06.7 | I'm afraid so, colleagues and I, about 20 years ago now, inadvertently made my voice very famous by creating those systems, which are now in about 8,000 locations up and down the UK High Street. |
| 1:17.8 | But they didn't just hire you as an actor to put on the voice. I mean, you were... |
| 1:20.5 | Sadly not. |
| 1:21.1 | The brains behind the idea. |
| 1:23.1 | Absolutely, yes. We came up with the system. At the time, 20 years ago, it was brand new technology, leading-edge stuff, which was all about giving people fairer, faster service. |
| 1:33.8 | And that was really about moving, say, at a post office, from multiple queues to a single queue. |
| 1:40.3 | Absolutely. Applying the principle of first in, first out, to the service dynamic in places like the post office, |
| 1:47.6 | so people could transparently see that the way they were getting allocated to service was fair. |
| 1:52.4 | Now, what is the Qmatic group whose board you sit on? |
| 1:55.8 | This is the successor business, the one we started 20 years ago. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.