The longer someone is at the counter, the more likely you are to see them. You’re biased towards seeing the relatively few people who take half an hour.
I'm reminded of this train/bus is taking ages to come.
If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them).
If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing).
Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions.
Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'.
And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?
My favorite chestnut regarding this is the one that occurred at Houston Intercontinental: https://archive.ph/Z3gjx
> SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
> Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
> So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
There is also the effect that buses arrive imprecisely and consequently may be best modeled as a Poisson distribution of arrival times. If this is the case and buses arrive on average every 15 minutes, then passengers arriving at random will wait not 7.5 minutes but 15 on average.
Intuitively, think of throwing a dart at the time line. We are more likely to hit the line in the bigger gaps between buses’s arrivals than between buses that arrive close to each other.
With buses you will on average end up waiting longer than the average rate when there's heavy traffic because sometimes they get stacked up right behin each other, and two (or once I had three) buses arriving at once is the same as one big one operating at a fraction of the rate. I remember this being relatively common when I used to take the bus.
But those are also the people who ruin it for everyone. Why not heavily optimize for the 90% good case via full automation and discourage time intensive behavior. I'm thinking either only taking online reservations or doing a 30% surcharge for walk-ins. The happy case should be that I book online, I get a parking spot location where the car is and a QR code I show on exit. Hertz Gold at SFO is like 80% there, yet the normal case remains having to walk to a desk. It seems in their interest to discourage going to the desk as much as possible.
Would be interesting if they offered a subscription service and/or loyalty tier that gives you "real" reservations. Call it "$BRAND Car Guarantee." That way, you know that the customers are committing to actually get their cars, and you can make a term of service that you don't miss N cars per T time (this would be displayed prominently - call it something friendly like "house rules").
Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
The interesting part is WHY for some people it takes so long that everybody else has to wait.
Imagine being on a high speed train and having to travel at the speed of the slowest train in front or if e-mail were sent using snail mail.
It obviously happens frequently enough that virtually everyone who ever rented a car - even only that one time - noticed it, so why they do not optimize for that?
I used to rent cars very often and I had to wait every single time I went there, it's not really a bias, it's a certainty.
Lately there have been some improvements on that front and a couple of the major rental companies made it almost painless if you are a regular customer, but it's still a lottery most of the times.
zhte415|4 years ago
If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them).
If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing).
Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions.
Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'.
And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?
bobthepanda|4 years ago
> SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
> Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
> So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
todd8|4 years ago
Intuitively, think of throwing a dart at the time line. We are more likely to hit the line in the bigger gaps between buses’s arrivals than between buses that arrive close to each other.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
simplestats|4 years ago
ajmurmann|4 years ago
jackson1442|4 years ago
Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
llampx|4 years ago
daoismyname|4 years ago
The interesting part is WHY for some people it takes so long that everybody else has to wait.
Imagine being on a high speed train and having to travel at the speed of the slowest train in front or if e-mail were sent using snail mail.
It obviously happens frequently enough that virtually everyone who ever rented a car - even only that one time - noticed it, so why they do not optimize for that?
I used to rent cars very often and I had to wait every single time I went there, it's not really a bias, it's a certainty.
Lately there have been some improvements on that front and a couple of the major rental companies made it almost painless if you are a regular customer, but it's still a lottery most of the times.