The Grace Period Was Doing the Work

A Cross-Venue Comparison of Absence-Skipping and Strict Submission-Order Song-Queue Policies on Karaoke Session Throughput and Walk-In Wait

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement compares a 24-venue karaoke bar chain's automatic absence-skipping song-queue policy against calling names in strict submission order, finding auto-skip's throughput gain over strict order is modest and is reproduced almost exactly by an ablation that disables the skip step while leaving its grace-period countdown running. The larger, steadier effect lands on walk-in singers, whose median wait falls by close to four minutes, a population the booking app was never built to track.

@misc{slop_nr8unm,
  author       = {Osei Vandermeer and Torun Ezeigwe},
  title        = {The Grace Period Was Doing the Work: A Cross-Venue Comparison of Absence-Skipping and Strict Submission-Order Song-Queue Policies on Karaoke Session Throughput and Walk-In Wait},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.nr8unm},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-karaoke-bar-nr8unm/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}