No one likes waiting in line to check out. In this blog post I’ll propose a dream store where you only have to wait in line 1/10th of the time. Or 1/100th of the time. You choose.

The idea is simple: right before you pay, you select an N, then some random number generator picks a random number from 1 to N. If the random number is N, you pay a multiple of N times your bill. Otherwise, you can waltz right out of the store with your loot.

The beauty of this system is that if there’s someone who doesn’t want the variance, they can just choose N=1 and pay the full bill 100% of the time like usual.

Gamers may recognize this as EV-weighted Credit Card Roulette applied to normal shopping. But while that’s mostly just mindless gambling, this is actually a serious time-saving device.

Implementation Details

The two biggest things are:

  • You have to make people preregister what they want to buy before they choose N. Otherwise people will take stuff out of their cart when they lose.
  • You have to put a limit on N to make sure people can actually pay up when they lose. Ideally this limit would vary by shopper in proportion to their bank account.

So maybe stores set up little pods. You enter with your cart, it locks you in, you swipe your card and get told your max N, you pick your N and roll, and if you lose, someone comes over to check you out, otherwise the doors open and you’re free to go.

How much time would this save?

This article says we spend 29 minutes a week in line at the grocery store. Let’s say everyone picks N=5. Then we’re talking 23 minutes of saving per week * 52 weeks = 20 hours a year per person. Factor in other purchasing sites like clothes and gas and I think it could be 1 day a year.