It's not just me!

It's now been 10 days since coming back and I feel right at home again. Adjusting to Beijing time took a day but the high temperatures was not something I was fully prepared for. The first few days back it was in the 100's added with humidity but it has since cooled down into the 80's. My first trip to Wal-mart to restock the fridge I saw the result of the heat - impatience. As many of you know my Chinese language skills don't really exist but I think I'm pretty good at reading body language and so when I saw a man yelling at another person while pointing to the line of people, I figured it was a line dispute and was happy that I'm not the only one who gets frustrated with the lack of order and imagined the day that I might have the guts to tell someone off for cutting. Many people doubt I would have it in me (language aside) but ask my 6th grade D.A.R.E. classmates - I can pull off the irate-person-who-yells-at-you-for-cutting-in-front-of-me shockingly well. To complete this story, it might help to have a visual aide.

Visual Aide: At the Target in Mira Mesa the under-15-items checkout lanes comprise of three mini-registers in a row. The procedure that would make sense to most Americans is that a single line would form and as each register clears from a previous customer, you would then proceed to that cashier. In my neighborhood Wal-mart, such common sense does not exist and as a result you would have three lines of people where in America, you would have one - refer to illustration below.


As you can see, this can make for a confusing and frustrating experience. I recall a mathematical proof (UCSD Econ172B?) that showed waiting in a single queue and then filtering to a register as it becomes available results on a lower average wait time per customer. I tried to enforce this concept of a single queue once but I wasn't big enough to hold people back - surprisingly even Scott isn't big enough to hold the people back even with the existence of waist-high metal bars that separate the lines. Anyway, back to the incident that started this discussion, I think a family was trying to be a C1 and someone in C2 wouldn't take it. The end result was a yelling match with the whole store watching, C1's child breaking out in tears, and the Wal-mart staff taking said C1 family and checking them out at a different register.

This story reminded me - kudos to the Filipino people and their tourists. We were at the Manila airport and there were long lines to get to the check-in counter. Despite the crowds and lack of ropes that are usually used to guide lines, everyone figured out where the end of the line was on their own and cutting was down to a minimum.