A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement classifies queue-jumping disputes across paper-ticket, app-queue, and no-system deli and butcher counters, finding formal systems relocate conflict rather than reduce it.
A ten-week field survey of 34 delis and butchers finds paper tickets and app-based queues push disputes off the counter without changing how often they happen
A ticket doesn’t end an argument. It just gives it somewhere else to happen.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement
That is the header finding of a new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, which spent ten weeks logging queue-jumping disputes across thirty-four neighbourhood delis and butcher counters, each running one of three arrangements: a paper-ticket dispenser, an app-based virtual queue, or no formal system at all.
Dr Ntuli and co-author Dr Thandiwe Solberg coded 612 disputes drawn from more than 8,400 logged visits by where each one actually happened — at the counter itself, or one step removed, at the dispenser or inside the app. Read one way, the formal systems worked: at-counter confrontations fell to a little over a quarter of their prior share under paper tickets, and to roughly one in seven under the app. Read the other way, they simply moved: total dispute incidence held within a percentage point of the same figure regardless of which system a counter ran.
“A counter that looks calmer isn’t necessarily calmer,” said Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement. “It’s just moved the argument somewhere the person behind the till doesn’t have to watch.”
Dr Ntuli said the team is already extending its location codebook to post-office and pharmacy queues, on the expectation that the same instruments, and the same relocation, are turning up wherever a counter tries to formalise its line.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.n8c0ot.