MovieChat Forums > MythBusters (2003) Discussion > They're not testing the shopping the Cos...

They're not testing the shopping the Costco way

posted 8 years ago by jgroub
6 replies | jump to latest

In the latest episode, they're testing line waiting times in grocery stores. They have the customers waiting at the end of the serpentine until the preceding customer is completely, totally finished. That adds an extra 5 seconds to each wait.

That's just not the way it's done. People start lining up behind someone who's almost done, so that the extra 5 seconds of waiting - the extra time it takes doesn't exist.

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[–] dead_sun 8 years ago

They use the serpentine line method at Best Buy.

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[–] kameljoe21-1 8 years ago

Shopping lines are not allways full, there are too many varibles to effectly test what is better.

I shop at a few different stores, my local small store, Safeway, Walmart.
During these shopping trips, my small store is the least amount of wait time, safe way i wait a little, and Walmart is the worst, they have over 20 checkouts but only a couple of people who manage the checkouts.

When people shop they notice when to go to the checkout, thus avoid waiting in the lines, self check outs are super effective when you have a few items.
also a lot of people will let you cut in line if you only have a few item and you have a large amount,

[–] skat1140 8 years ago

To me the most annoying thing about MB is demonstrated in the Shopping Line tests.

They spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, manpower building and testing this set, and because of obvious limitations on time, they can only really test a few configurations, a few times.

Stuff like this cries out for computer simulations, where you can make all sorts of tweaks in the variables... then test it 10,000 times to get a true value for any one configuration.

As it is, even when they test a configuration, they have -1- result.

Obviously, this takes a lot of the "sexiness" out of it and there are no explosions. But this is a definitive way to test their suppositions, and it would be good if they could "sneak in" such a simulation: ie, saying "by the way, one of our volunteers from UCB made this simulation, let's have a quick look at his results."

[–] manchld84 8 years ago

That's just not the way it's done. People start lining up behind someone who's almost done, so that the extra 5 seconds of waiting - the extra time it takes doesn't exist.

I know right? I came on here to discuss this very issue. In no world would a single customer be at the register/belt area with customers behind them in any sort of line configuration. I appreciate all the effort they put into making a fake store and pricing items, not sure why didn't they just print the price on their fake labels, but it was still an interesting experiment. However, that one detail about customers waiting until the previous is COMPLETELY out of line, is not realistic. Also, they just ran the experiments once each. Like other users have said, one experiment is not a statistic. They should have run it minimum 3 times with diff sets of ppl to get an average. They had a whole team of statisticians, but I don't think they used them enough.

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[–] Kruleworld 8 years ago

However, that one detail about customers waiting until the previous is COMPLETELY out of line, is not realistic

Don't they have those little batons that customers can use to separate their shopping on the conveyor? (ie so you don't have to wait)

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[–] manchld84 8 years ago

They didnt appear to have them in the experiment, but yes that's exactly what I was thinking of and what would happen in the real world

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