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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Its certainly unintuitive. Same issue with single-person bathrooms.

Reminds me of the of the old business problem - the kiosk coffee drive-up has line 6 cars long during morning rush. Then they stop coming when commute time is over. What could/should the business planner do?

Could put in another window, hire double the employees, get the line down to 2 or 3 cars during rush. But that costs a bunch (almost double the run rate).

OR, could raise prices. The line will get shorter. Revenue goes up with no investment, and you'll serve about the same number of cars each commute time (there's always a line, so it doesn't matter how long when calculating cars served during rush, its the same total). Which is a better answer.

See the demand is pretty inflexible, and only lasts say 7-9AM. Meaning your customer count is pretty much fixed. Two windows doesn't actually serve any more people, but costs about double, losing you money.

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Or pull a Chick-fil-a and send someone out with a tablet to take all orders and possibly payments. Takes one extra person (or no extra people if you have a McDonald’s style pay window and food window), and the line moves faster because nearly all orders are ready as soon as the driver reaches the window, or shortly after. No need to raise prices (and thus risk losing customers) if you can increase the throughput with minimal cost.

One of the biggest issues with drive thru lines is that often very few people have actually placed their order at a time, so the kitchen isn’t actually running at the pace needed to handle all the orders that are about to come in. Get the orders earlier and increase the pace in the kitchen, everything else can keep up because the kitchen is the bottleneck in a place like that.

Many coffee shops are limited to the rate they can build drinks. A backlog of orders wouldn't speed those up.

But I get the point. There may be some processes that are order-rate-limited. Witness the technology put in place at Fry's Electronics, with their signaling paddles like a ramp agent at an airport. How nice if your biggest problem is, taking the customers' money fast enough!

Around here that is the Dutch Bros or general coffee drive up process already. It also lets the people in the shop just make drinks instead of stopping to use the cash register or back (including any hand sanitation in between). Though Dutch is usually well staffed and rarely not busy.

> See the demand is pretty inflexible, and only lasts say 7-9AM

This is the base hypothesis that doesn’t match semi-realistic situations.

As long as the demand exceeds your lining capacity (let’s say no more than 20 cars because of sheer space constraints, or when the last in queue would be served past 9AM, which is an actually inflexible limit), consuming the queue twice or three times as fast would bring more revenue.

It stops being interesting expanding mostly when your processing ability match the demand or it the cost/benefit balance changes (e.g. you have to buy the surrounding buildings)

I don't think so. Its not a line limit, its a mean length issue. If you spend more and empty the line, then you haven't made a dime more. In fact if you spent money doing that, you lost money.

That's the issue - if the customer pool is inflexible, the rational thing is to raise prices until you hit that limit.

Now if the line is self-limiting (folks wont queue if it 'looks too long') then there's something to that.

There's a fastfood chain in Poland named North Fish, which serves relatively expensive fish burgers etc., but at the same time offers a 50% discount on everything during the last 30 minutes of their business day.

The lines are indeed short there, but I only discovered this discount scheme by accident - they don't advertise it too heavily.

The food is average for the price and they're always right next to other options which leads me to believe that it's the short lines that are their product.

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