Looks can be deceiving. Just walk into the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle in Manhattan and you'll see a long line of people waiting to check out. They're queued up in a similar fashion to the people up at airport ticket counters. At first glance, you'd think that the line would take forever but, in reality, it moves much more quickly than having people find a place on line at individual checkouts.
Maggie Fitzgerald was one consumer who first took a look at the line snaking out in front of Whole Foods' checkouts and said she wanted nothing to do with it. But, she found that even with as many as 50 people on the lead-up line, checking out at the Columbus Circle store went much more quickly than other places where she shopped.
She told The New York Times, "By now, you'd think everyone else would catch onto this."
Checkout time has always been near the top of customers' complaints in supermarkets. It becomes even more pronounced in busy, inner city stores. The success that Whole Foods has achieved in moving people through its queues so quickly has caught the attention of competitors.
"It's very impressive," Jon Basalone, a senior vice president at Trader Joe's, told The Times.
Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell and author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, said managing time is extremely important for consumers and therefore it's critical that retailers help them move on to the next event in their lives.
"We have good clocks in our heads for roughly three minutes," said Mr. Underhill. "Once we get beyond that, time expands wildly. If somebody is there for 4.5 minutes and you ask them how long they waited, they will say 15 minutes."
According to The Times, Whole Foods knew it would be faced with challenges at the front-end and spent months working on a plan to keep lines moving. It was during this time period that the company concluded that the standard system, with people queuing up at individual checkouts, would take up too much space in the store and, in the process, slow down those looking to check out and others still shopping.
Slower lines at other stores have consumers considering shopping at Whole Foods, according to The Times. One individual shopping at Whole Foods, Michael Ridgway, claimed to no longer shop at Trader Joe's.
"The line just does not move and makes it impossible to shop in the store," he said.
Discussion Questions: How important are fast checkouts to the consumer perception of service received in the store? Does the system being used by the Columbus Circle Whole Foods offer an opportunity for others? Is the current checkout system in grocery stores throughout the U.S. broken?