Picking the quickest checkout line at the supermarket isn’t rocket science.

It’s more like actuarial science.

OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.

But when inquiring minds at CTV Kitchener wanted to know if there was a way to determine the optimal checkout line for speeding through, we thought an actuary might be the sort of person who would have insight into something like that.

So we called up our contacts at the University of Waterloo, who put us in touch with Steve Drekic.

He’s a professor of statistics and actuarial science. Surely if anyone knows a thing or two about picking the right line at the checkouts, it’s him.

Right?

“I often pick the wrong line,” he said. “You’re talking about a waiting line system where there’s randomness in the way customers arrive … but there’s also randomness within the servers.”

OK, so there’s no perfect protocol. But while Drekic calls the question “very complicated,” he says there are a few things people can do to better their odds.

The most effective way to determine the right line, Drekic says, is to spend a few minutes watching the checkouts to see which cashiers might move people through quicker, which lanes seem to get their groceries bagged with more speed, and so on.

Of course, taking the time to do that would defeat the entire point of trying to get through the line quickly.

In addition to talking to Drekic, we also solicited opinions from shoppers at a busy plaza in Waterloo. After all, anyone coming from a grocery store just put at least a little bit of thought into which checkout they’d use.

We found one common theme in the shoppers’ responses. Almost all of them said they would look for a line full of relatively empty carts, even if it was a little bit longer than the others.

“There might be a lot of people, but they don’t have a lot of stuff,” said one woman.

As she and others explained it, the advantage to that approach is that, theoretically, the extra time spent paying for groceries is more than made up for by the smaller amount of time spent moving items through the scanner.

Drekic isn’t so sure of that. He says “socializing” – the process of greeting the cashier, applying coupons, paying for the order and so forth – can take as much as 45 seconds.

“It may actually be in your best interest to go behind the person that has the large number of items, simply because that person is going to go through and there will be less socializing with every new person,” he said.

Other pieces of advice for wannabe speedy shoppers include:

  • Considering self-serve checkouts, which can feature shorter lines and less of the socialization aspect
  • Avoiding lanes with people who may look like they might take more time to figure out their payment
  • Putting items onto the checkout lane with their bar codes facing up, to make it quicker for them to be scanned

With reporting by Allison Tanner