Queueing Questionnaires

Overheard in a supermarket:

Customer to Friend: "If my dad hadn't died at 84, I'm sure he would have lived to 90."


I do several questionnaires for various studies on a regular basis; one for the Protect Study, which monitors mental decline with age (not that I'm declining mentally) and one for how people are coping with lockdown.

One of the questions asked on both studies is whether I ever get overcome by feelings of worthlessness. The problem is that there's no tick box for 'Only when I talk to my wife'.

Remember when a barrier to going into a supermarket was the queues at the till? Social distancing has almost overcome that and has moved the bottleneck to the entrance. The knock-on effects of this are twofold:

1. With fewer people entering a store at any one time and the shorter till queues, the fewer people the stores need to employ at the tills.
2. The presence of a long queue outside a store acts as a deterrent, bringing fewer people in the store in the first place, leading to even fewer people needing to be employed.

I think my breaking point is about 10 minutes in a queue. Any more than that will result in me going elsewhere, even if I have to pay more when I get there - or simply not bothering at all. Our local Tesco no longer has queues, but Lidl can have one of 20 people. If there are indeed 20 people queuing for Lidl, I'll go to Tesco and spend more for the same items, especially if it's raining, as there is no weather protection at Lidl. This amazes me, as our local Lidl was shut down for the best part of 4 months for renovation and only opened in late May. Given the current situation you'd think it would be small fry to make the necessary changes to accommodate the new way of working.