How to Pick the Fastest Line at the Supermarket

Inside a Whole Foods in Brooklyn.CreditNina Westervelt for The New York Times



But all is not lost.


Get behind a shopper who has a full cart






Go left for faster service


Look for female cashiers



Study the customers ahead and what they are buying

It is not just the number of people ahead of you, but their age and what they are buying that can make a difference, Professor Marsden said. Older people will take a bit longer because they can have difficulties that delay the checkout process, such as not understanding how a debit card works, she said.

Also consider the number of different items they are buying, Professor Larson said. Six bottles of the same soda will go faster than six totally different items, some of which cannot be scanned, such as vegetables, he said.

If you have no irregular items, such as produce, use a self-service checkout, Mr. Meyer said. “You’ll lose the human contact but gain time,” he said.

Choose a single line that leads to several cashiers



Still, most people prefer to take their chances with parallel lines — individual lines dedicated to a single cashier — even though most of the time they end up picking a slower line, Professor Marsden said.


So why is the less efficient parallel line model used at grocery stores? “Essentially, nobody wants a huge line of folks with full grocery carts winding (like a serpent) around their store,” he said in an email.

Beware of lines with obstructions

If you find yourself in a line that snakes around a corner or where the cashier’s view of the number of customers is obstructed by a wall or a shelf, be prepared for a longer wait, one study found. The study, by Professors Niederhoff and Masha Shunko of the University of Washington and Yaroslav Rosokha of Purdue University, released in June, noted that obstructions hinder the feedback cashiers get from seeing how their work thins the line.

What can you do to speed up service?

Mr. Samuel recommended:

• Always face bar codes toward the cashier.



Remember: A lot of the waiting game is mental


Customers are more concerned with how long a line is than how fast it moves, according to research by Prof. Ziv Carmon of the business school Insead and Prof. Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University. Given a choice between a slow-moving short line and a fast-moving long one, people will often opt for the short line, even if the waits are identical.

The psychology of queuing has also found that waits seem shorter when you are distracted. Professor Norton recommended talking to the person next to you or reading the magazines in the store’s racks.

“And try to lose the idea that you are cursed,” he said. “If you remembered the times when it actually went smoothly, you would probably realize that it evens out in the long run.”