![\"Waiting](\"https:\/\/www.neuropool.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/26199.jpg\")
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Consumers often have to wait in long queues to buy a product. This not only creates economic costs due to lost time, but also psychological costs due to boredom, frustration and customer dissatisfaction.
How do long queues influence consumer behaviour?<\/p>\n
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Given that long queues make customers unhappy, why are they so widespread? Shouldn't every shop take care to serve its customers quickly? The fact that customers often have to wait for a long time is partly due to the fact that a long queue is a universal sign of good quality of the product for other customers. A restaurant where no one eats is not popular, even if there would not be a long wait, because it tells the customer that the quality cannot be good. So here, waiting for service can even be desirable.<\/p>\n
Market researchers have studied the effect of waiting on customers' buying decisions. Statistically, the more time a customer spends in a shop, the more he or she buys. Boredom while waiting causes the customer's eyes to roam over the products on offer and in this way they always find something that interests them. In supermarkets, smaller and less expensive products are strategically presented at the checkout so that the waiting customer looks at them and throws them into his shopping trolley, since they don't cost that much and therefore don't have to think about it for long.
In restaurants, drinks are served first, before the food is ordered, so that the customer already starts drinking when looking at the menu. By the time the food arrives, the drink is already ready and he orders another one. Here, waiting for service clearly causes an increase in consumption behaviour.<\/p>\n
In addition to these facts, the customer is conscious of his time. If he spends a long time waiting to be served, when he is finally served he wants to use this time to make an additional purchase so that he does not have to come back shortly and wait again. A larger purchase allows customers to offset the time cost of the long wait. If they were to buy very little after investing all that waiting time, the long wait would not have been worthwhile.<\/p>\n
Companies are always trying to make customers' waiting time more pleasant. Of course, the problem would be solved immediately by providing more staff, but this is often not profitable for reasons of cost or space. Screens or reading material are often provided to entertain customers. However, experience has shown that although these practices make the waiting time more pleasant and thus the customers more satisfied, they end up spending less money. This means that if the company only focuses on customer satisfaction, revenues will decrease.<\/p>\n
This is in line with the unconscious compensation of the time spent. When distracted during the waiting time, the customer does not feel the need to compensate for the time by making a larger purchase, because the waiting time seems less long to him.<\/p>\n
In many situations, a reasonably long waiting time is advantageous from the company's point of view. This is especially the case when the correlation between purchase quantity and service time is low.<\/p>\n
Customers seem more inclined to increase the amount they buy to justify the time spent than to stop buying there in the future due to their dissatisfaction.
Whether a queue has a positive impact on the company often influences the consumption decision. Customers queuing to buy the new iPhone will certainly not buy another phone just because they have to wait longer. In this case, it often makes more sense to serve more customers at the same time to increase customer satisfaction. Even if a customer already buys a larger quantity because of the offer, the effect of a queue is rather insignificant. This is because discount supermarkets, for example, often take special care to avoid queues at the checkout, as the overall customer satisfaction scores are more positive.<\/p>\n
How can the customer take advantage of this knowledge of waiting for service and the impact on buying behaviour? If one is aware of the effect of the queue, next time one should try to distract oneself from boredom elsewhere and not study the products on offer. This way you can avoid spending more money than you intended.<\/p>\n\n\n How to recognise when you are being manipulated<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n