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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that always frustrates me (despite being very much in the "first world problems" category) is when queueing or reservation systems are unclear or chaotic or otherwise unfair, although I generally only encounter this at stores, never for something as significant as a house! The most ubiquitous one is the practice of totally separate parallel queues where you just have to guess which queue will be fastest. Another lovely related one is when you're waiting in your queue for quite some time, then a new queue opens up right next to you and quickly fills up with newcomers who haven't been waiting at all! Come on store owners, just have a single queue with multiple consumers popping off the same queue! Again, I'm not going to pretend this isn't totally a first world problem!

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Berlin's international film festival has this horrendous system where they'll release a small batch of tickets online every morning on certain dates, and you just have to sit there, refresh refresh and hope you clicked fast enough.

Serious major events use a lottery system, which is vastly more fair and means you don't need the server infrastructure to deal with this huge flood of requests. I'm not really sure why everything doesn't work like that: let people submit their requests/applications/whatever, and if you truly have zero other criteria, just process them in random order after a cutoff.

Camping reservations for Ontario Parks are a big mess like this— so much so that people do ridiculous hacks like booking the full two weeks that lead into their desired weekend and later paying a fee to cancel just the first part of it. By the time the actual popular weekend would have come available for online booking, it was already taken weeks earlier.

I wrote a script to poll the Parks Canada reservation system for availability for a camping trip I wanted to do, so that I'd get notified the instant someone cancelled and space became available.

Sadly after two weeks they banned my IP for the rest of the year and I was no longer able to make reservations without going through a proxy.

I'm pretty sure they do this on their own now. I set up "notify me" for a site and got tons of emails as sites became available.

A friend and I made a website based around this called campalert.live We've had to stop doing BC and National Parks as the API changed and we haven't had time to update our end. But Alberta still works!

Wow, thank you for explaining this!! I was wondering how weekends that were "not yet available for online booking" were already nearly fully booked when I looked on the booking site. Very irritating that people do this... With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and start doing this myself, if that's the price of admission

It's definitely a prisoner's dilemma type of situation— no one wants it to be like that, but once there's a critical mass of people doing it, then you kind of have to. Once everyone does, you're back to square one, except with a system based on unwritten rules that are confusing and exclude the uninitiated.

And it's not obvious how to fix it in a way that doesn't screw up the system for someone else:

- exorbitant cancellation fees would punish people whose plans change, and a lot of people would just swallow the extra cost anyway.

- insisting that the entire timeframe be in scope at time of booking would make it hard or impossible to book longer vacations at popular spots (which at this point is basically anything within 4h of Toronto).

- making the whole season available at once would create an ultra high stakes feeding frenzy, with the servers probably ending up crashing.

- some kind of bidding or lottery setup would be extra complexity, and would end up rewarding people with the time, money, and schedule flexibility to "play" whatever the system is.

I suppose the Ontario Parks mandate is to just maximize utilization, so from their point of view it doesn't really matter as long as weekends are booked solid and at least some proportion of the canceled midweek days end up being scooped up later by retirees or whoever.

Something went wrong here. The price of the house should have been raised until only 1 person wanted to buy it. If you're first in line, the incentive is to sell it at a higher price to the person who's second in line, right?

I have to imagine some sort of regulatory thing was going on here, like they have to provide X% of units at Y% of market rate in order to get some tax concession or something.

I know there's not going to be a lot of sympathy for higher housing prices here, but it does feel like something went wrong in this specific case.

For the people selling, it is often more profitable (or at least less hassle) to sell quickly with minimal fuss and move onto the next one.

It's like how event tickets are routinely scalped. The thing that is going wrong is that the additional bid isn't worth the reputational drama.

Homo economicus would understand that the seller is simply being efficient. Homo sapiens gets all emotional about it.

In a big development I imagine clearing inventory in a straightforward way at prices that'll net you a good profit margin anyway is more appealing than trying to run bidding wars for each unit individually. Depending on the market it's also possible that the gap between "price four people are willing to pay" and "price nobody is willing to pay" isn't very significant.

There's also a goodwill aspect in other cases: Sony kept selling PS5s at MSRP even when scalpers were getting $800+, because better for them that people are pissed at the scalpers than dealing with the bad PR of such a huge price hike over previous generations.

Yeah, for established brands like Sony who expect to have long recurring relationships with customers, it wouldn't make sense to run auctions on products because you're just going to upset people and no one will think you're making mass-market products any more. The same goes for some popular musicians: they could make more at a particular show by auctioning off tickets, but they often go out of their way to have a lottery and prevent people from re-selling tickets at higher prices.

It seems possible that a large housing developer has similar incentives.

Another variation I have been on both sides of: stores favoring certain channels over others. For example, a local fast-food restaurant might prioritize answering the phone for carry-out orders over in-person carry out orders.

I definitely appreciate a single queue. It doesn’t seem to be the norm though.

If it’s a place you frequent, pay close attention. The checker is usually a stronger indicator of line speed than the number of items in peoples’ baskets.

Whole Foods near me does this awful thing where the lines are in the aisles. You can’t even see how long the line is without walking the entire length of the store.

This was tried in a number of stores in Sweden. It lasted a couple of months after which they reverted to one queue per cashier. Turns out it wasn’t popular, either with the vendor, the customers, or both.

On a personal note I found the practice irritating for not really clear reasons. One might be that it’s a chore to traverse the whole queue cordoning when it happens to be empty. In any case, over time being the one skipping the line when a new register opens averages out. Also, there’s the lucky draw feeling when you get to skip that otherwise gets lost.

A number of stores here in Kitchener (Canada) use the single queue approach, particularly to feed a bank of self checkout stations. But I've also seen it at Old Navy (clothing), Winners (discount clothing), Indigo (bookstore), and others.

I think the main thing that's maybe a bit annoying is just that it's easy for the single line to stall if the people at the front of it aren't paying attention or don't know what to look for. So the store often ends up having to have an extra attendant who just stands there and pokes people for when a till comes available.

Is a jealousy issue? Without the second line you were going to take as long as you were. Opening a second line helped people further back catch up and in some cases surpass your speed. Someone else having a quicker experience shouldn't have changed your experience.

maybe it's more of a fairness issue. in theory, the proper way should be to have a single line that funnels to any available lane, so any newcomer would still have to join the same line and not get any advantage over someone who has been waiting.

I wouldn’t call it jealousy to want everyone to be served in the order they arrived, since that’s obviously the intention of flat unprioritized queues. You can certainly make arguments that FIFO isn’t the best or right way to process a grocery store checkout queue, but for now I’d rather it be implemented well rather than poorly.

Wouldn't it average out over time anyway? I.e. sometimes you're unlucky and have to wait twice as long as if you'd arrived to the queue a bit later, sometimes you're lucky and have your wait time cut in half. Over many store trips it's halfway between the one-queue and two-queue processing time.

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