Day Twenty-Nine ... It's About the Queue, You Know.

Getting in the Right Queue

Finding the right queue should really be easy.  Some places have 32 queues.  Of course only a few queues are open to anyone, and some queues are open just to people with fewer items.  

Finding, or picking, the right queue is a lot like looking for a job.  You look at the person controlling the queue.  They appear competent, perhaps pleasant, but things just don't move along as they should.  It should go smoothly.  Everyone knows the process.  The facts are clear.  The transactions simple.

HR people are the check-out and check-in people of the employment world.  It's a potential bottleneck that needs to be leveraged or avoided.
 
It's interesting that some companies have streamlined their employment queues, automating the process to look for key words, expressions, dates and probably errors of omission. 

In this particular store/queue scenario the business has, for whatever reason, not implemented the really slick self-checkout lines which usually eliminate the queue.  Home Depot's self-checkout is problematic.  Cub's is pretty good.  WalMart, the easy-to-hate company has done a great job.  Their manual check-out process was tedious and a bit unpleasant.  Eliminating the check-out person and replacing that with really good equipment and software has made the process much better.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that traditional jobs/queues are losing their appeal and reward to the self-checkout and self-defined job options.