You are usually in the slow one
Why Is the Other Queue Always Faster?
With three queues, two of them are faster than yours most of the time.
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Step 1 of 5
You are one queue out of several.
With three tills, your queue is the quickest about a third of the time. Two thirds of the time you can honestly say the other one moved faster.
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Step 2 of 5
One slow customer stops a whole queue.
Queues do not slow gradually. One person with a problem halts everyone behind them while the queues either side keep moving.
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Step 3 of 5
Memory keeps the annoying half.
Being overtaken is irritating and gets remembered. Quietly overtaking someone else is not noticed at all, so the record in your head is lopsided.
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Step 4 of 5
A single queue removes the gamble.
One line feeding all the tills means a slow customer delays only the next person, not a whole column. Everyone's wait gets shorter and much more predictable.
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Step 5 of 5
It also stops the switching.
Changing queues puts you at the back of a new one, which usually costs more than it saves. With one queue there is nothing to change to.
Banks and airports adopted single queues for exactly this reason; supermarkets mostly have not, because tills need to sit by the aisles.
The short version
With several queues, yours is fastest only a fraction of the time — and one shared queue makes every wait fairer and shorter.
Try it yourself
Next time you queue, count the tills. Your chance of picking the fastest is one over that number.
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