Nick Byrnes has a name for the “waiting rooms” hiding in plain sight at many retail stores. They’re called checkout lanes.

“It may not have four walls and a sign, but it typically is the only area where customers are asked to stand in one place and wait to be served,” says Byrnes, vice president of sales and business development for Lawrence Metal Products.

Making the “waiting room” enjoyable can pay off for retailers. Ross Dress for Less, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based discount retailer, saw the number of “drops” -- customers who left without completing their purchases -- decline significantly in the stores in which the checkout area was redesigned to move them more quickly, says Brad White, senior director of store planning and design. “We saw significant improvement in drops and customer satisfaction.”

Admittedly, queue management, as it’s known, isn’t an area that attracts a great deal of management time and attention, Byrne says. But the queuing area offers customers one last chance to decide whether or not to complete their purchases. Handled improperly, it can turn a pleasant shopping experience into an exercise in frustration.

While it would be a stretch to call “queue theory” a science, it has been a topic of study, Byrne says. Retailers typically choose from three types of lines. One is “lane per lane,” the typical grocery store set-up. Another option is disbursed or “virtual” queuing; these are commonly found within delis and bakeries. Customers don’t actually get into line, but take a number and are called in order.

Finally, there’s single-point queuing -- what travelers typically encounter at the airport. Everyone is corralled into a single line, and once they’ve reached the front, they move to the next available service representative.

A single-line queue is both fair and efficient, Byrne says: customers don’t have to guess which line is going to move most quickly. Moreover, the queuing area typically can be smaller than for the other methods, although it’s easy to extend the lines to accommodate larger groups.

In late 2006, White and his team looked at various ways to move Ross’ customers through the checkout lines more quickly. The goals were to reduce customer frustration and the number of customers who left without completing their purchases.

For these reasons, White zeroed in on the single-line system, and decided to implement an electronic call forward solution from Lawrence Metal, a provider of queuing systems based in Bay Shore, N.Y. The system alerts customers when a sales associate is ready for the next transaction and reduces the time customers spend in line by about 25 percent, Byrne says.

To activate the alert, a sales associate presses a button once he or she has completed a transaction and closed the cash drawer. Displays at the register, as well as at the head of the line, indicate which register is free. (Each register can be set up to display arrows pointing to the now-open register -- helpful when columns or pillars make it hard for customers to see the displays at each register.)

The system also can be linked to the corporate network; doing so allows for a few more features. For example, the marketing department can program the displays to run promotional messages when they’re not displaying a register number.

Prime real estate
The system offers several other benefits. Transactions are completed more quickly, so salespeople can check out more customers. Because the line steadily moves forward, customers don’t feel trapped in place; as a result, they’re less likely to leave the store annoyed and without buying anything. At the same time, customers recognize the inherent fairness of the line, since they know they’ll be served in the order in which they arrived.

In addition, because every customer will spend some time within the queuing area, it’s prime real estate for merchandising. Case in point: one client of Lawrence Metals placed impulse items in its queuing area. Management found that 75 percent of customers looked at the items, more than one-third interacted with them and 10 percent purchased at least one of the items.

Several other retailers have placed bowls of small impulse items like lip gloss, candy and tissues within their queuing areas, boosting sales of those items by as much as 800 percent, Byrne says. (Retailers don’t want to over-merchandise the queue, however; if they offer too many options, customers can spend so much time making their purchasing decisions that the line actually slows down.)

Deploying the system typically costs between $6,000 and $10,000 per store, Byrne says, though the price tag increases if the retailer has to reconfigure the register area to accommodate a single-line queue. While this isn’t absolutely necessary, it’s usually the most efficient use of space, he says. Retailers with several dozen registers may decide that it makes sense to configure them into several single-line sections.

Pilot test results
The qualitative and quantitative results from Ross’ pilot test were impressive, White says. “We would talk with customers, and they would say that it was better,” and the number of drops declined to “next to nothing.” Moreover, learning the system takes no more than a few minutes.

Merchandising the area in which customers waited boosted the average sales ticket, White says. The system also enables store managers to use employees more efficiently, as they receive a steady stream of customers. And loss prevention efforts receive a boost because the system dramatically reduces the possibilities for “sweethearting”: With the electronic call forwarding system, it’s just about impossible for the person standing in line to gauge which sales associate will ring him up.

As of late April, Ross was preparing to expand the pilot to a half-dozen stores. While White declined to say how much Ross is planning to invest in the system, he says his team has been able to recoup its investment within each store in less than a year. “It’s a very compelling story for us,” he says.