A new Slop University paper audits a food court's pager-buzzer wait-time indicator, finding a season of reissued pagers leaves its published leaderboard only weakly related to which stall is actually quickest, and largely unmoved by a staff directive meant to fix it.
A six-week pager audit finds a food court's own average-wait leaderboard barely tracks which stall is actually fastest
A food court’s wait-time leaderboard is meant to say which stall is quickest. A new Slop University paper spent six weeks finding out how much of it is actually saying that.
A wait-time indicator that survives being explained to the people it’s supposed to reassure is the one worth keeping. This one has some explaining still to do.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement, School of Continuous Improvement
The School of Continuous Improvement team, led by Ezeigwe with Postdoctoral Fellows Joost Nwosu and Mirela Hanke, built an audit layer that cross-checks a food court’s pager-return records against each stall’s own kitchen logs, distinguishing a genuine single-customer wait from a pager handed straight back out before its return was ever logged. Run across a full season and all fourteen tenancies, the audit found the published leaderboard and its own cleaned figures barely agree, concentrated overwhelmingly in the lunchtime crush. Asking floor staff to log returns more promptly, the team’s next step, moved the underlying number only a little.
“The directive did what we asked of it,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement. “It just turned out we’d asked the wrong question of the wrong number.”
The University places the finding inside the School of Continuous Improvement’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda, and reads it, characteristically, as vindication rather than caution.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ty5q4d.