A lot of queue nowadays are better and more automated, you can get your number and approximately estimate how much time you need to wait. Sometimes approximate serving time is even written on the ticket.
Source: http://willchua.com/
Problem:
- it's difficult for a regular person to estimate well time in the queue
- data about queueing time in particular location is not gathered
Source: http://flickr.com/thowi
Solution:
Smartphone app where people can "check-in" to a place where they are in the queue, provide their number and current time. Since it is usually quite boring the queue, people can mark when people with specific numbers called and which window they go to (if there are more than 1 serving windows/counters), this would help make information more precise and show some interesting facts, e.g. on Tuesdays window 2 is the slowest while on Thursdays it's window 4 (it might lead to the same person :)).
Source: http://flickr.com/gadl
In places without queue ticket numbers people can count people themselves and just press the button every time queue moves by one, or just do updates once in a while.
In the end we have a smartphone app which is:
1) Fun to use, make queue less boring
2) Crowdsourcing geolocated queue data
3) May potentially lead to improved service, faster/smaller queues (places, especially businesses, might be embarrassed to have slow/long queues displayed publicly)
4) Can much more precisely estimate when is your turn, so that you can do some other things and return to your queue later
People in the queue can work together, so that you would get up to date information even if you left your queue for a while.
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