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Nobody likes being last. We avoid picking the cheapest wine on the menu or the final donut in the box. “And we hate being picked last in gym class,” says Harvard Business School professor Ryan Buell.
“Humans are very social creatures, and we are driven to compare ourselves to others,” says Buell, the UPS Foundation Associate Professor of Service Management in the Technology and Operations Management Unit. “When we are feeling bad, one way we cope is by comparing ourselves to people who are worse off than we are.”
Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than while we are waiting in line. “Every line has an end and there is an identifiable person who occupies it,” says Buell. “They know they’re last and everyone around them knows it as well.”
The anxiety we feel about being last can affect how consumers experience waiting for a product or service—and can affect companies’ bottom lines —Buell explains in a new working paper, “Last Place Aversion in Queues (pdf).”
Buell’s research investigates how operations can be designed to better engage their customers, and how operational choices affect customer behaviors and firm performance.
We all spend a surprising amount of time waiting our turn; by one estimate, Americans wait in line 37 billion hours a year—118 hours for every person. Rationally, you might think that the only thing that matters during those times is what’s going on in front of you—how fast the cashier is ringing up customers, say, or how many tellers there are at the bank counter.
Buell’s research shows, however, that people are also concerned with what’s happening behind them, especially when there’s no one there.
“What seems to be driving this,” says Buell, “is our inability to make a downward social comparison. If I can’t look behind me and see someone else is willing to wait longer than me, I start to question whether waiting in line is worthwhile.”
Lining up for an experiment
He conducted a series of experiments to learn how being last affects consumer behavior. To get started, Buell and Harvard student Jay Chakraborty observed customers at a local grocery store with five checkout lanes—a total of 286 customers over a cumulative five hour span.
“These were relatively short lines, but what was surprising was how much jockeying for position there was,” he says. Customers regularly switched lines to try and decrease their wait time. Significantly, though, once someone got in line behind them, they tended to stay put. In fact, of the 71 customers who switched positions, 67 of them did it while they were in last place.
Short of stopping customers and asking them why they switched, it’s difficult to know exactly why they did so, or whether they were better off for their jockeying. To answer those questions, Buell set up an online experiment using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform.
[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]