.italiaball/puck.

Patrick Ewing and the Poisson process

Posted on March 4th, 2008 by Lango.
Categories: codogno, queueing theory.

Ugh. Just what I needed this Saturday morning at the supermarket, a reminder of my least favorite grad school class, Operations Management.

Saturdays usually get pretty crowded, as supermarkets are all closed on Sundays (along with most everything else). Some supermarkets also are closed Monday mornings or Thursday afternoons, or from 12:30pm to 3:30pm every day during the week, or one grocery store will have whole wheat bread while another doesn’t, which makes it necessary to plan out your grocery shopping around strange hours (at least to Americans) and various stocking patterns, or you can find yourself without bananas or tomatoes or milk or Nutella (scary!) and no way to buy it (convenience stores with extended hours and limited grocery sections do not exist).

Obviously the supermarket store manager must have slept through his ops management class as well, as at peak buying time there were only two of four registers open, while at least ten people waited in each line with carriages full of groceries. And don’t think Italians wait patiently or in orderly fashion.

What was that queueing theory all about again? Something about teams playing better when their star players are absent? Oh wait, no, that’s the Ewing Theory.

Queueing theory, on the other hand, has to do with waiting in lines, and in high traffic times of the day it would be beneficial to have all checkout lanes going, as to provide the best and most efficient service to the customer, and reducing waiting time. At lower traffic times you can reduce checkout staff and still not have service affected.

But doesn’t that actually make good business sense?

And that, quite simply, is why it will never be used here in small-town Italy.

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