By Tim Kadlec CHAPTER 4For more specific techniques, be sure to read the chapters by Aaron
Gustafson and Mat Marquis (in addition to the previously mentioned
chapter by Christian Heilmann). The point being: there is a lot you can do
to quickly and easily avoid excess bloat.
if You Can’T MaKe iT, faKe iT
Executives at the Houston airport had a problem: they were getting an ex-
tremely high number of complaints about how long it took for passengers
to collect their bags at the baggage claims.^29 Naturally, the first thing they
decided to do was hire more baggage handlers. The wait time fell to just
eight minutes, but the complaints persisted.
Digging deeper, as it so often does, revealed something far more inter-
esting. It turns out, the walk from the plane to the baggage claim area took
about one minute. Which meant that most people were spending seven
minutes standing and waiting at the baggage claim. If you’ve ever been to
an airport, you can understand how boring that can be.
So instead of trying to bring the wait time down any further, they
actually made the walk to the baggage claim longer. Passengers now had to
walk six times as far to get to their bags. On the surface, that sounds like a
surefire way to upset people. But the reality is that complaints plummeted.
Passengers were busy for most of the eight-minute wait, so even though it
took them just as long to get their bags, it felt faster.
There are numerous stories about the interesting way that people per-
ceive the passage of time. In New York, almost all the buttons you can push
at pedestrian crossings aren’t functional and haven’t been since the 1980s.
But many people still push them, believing it will save them a few seconds.
Disney, like many other attractions, hides the length of the waiting
lines by twisting them in a serpentine pattern and often masking some of
the line from view by strategically wrapping them around buildings. Why?