PAK'NSAVE AWAPUNI TRIALS QUEUE FOR THE QUEUE, BLOKES WITH ONE PIE NOW WAITING 25 MINUTES
Management calls it 'flow optimisation'. The bloke in front of me called it something else.
Pak'nSave Awapuni has rolled out a queue for the queue this week, a roped-off holding pen where customers wait to be told which checkout queue they're allowed to join. A bloke buying one mince and cheese pie clocked 25 minutes in the system on Tuesday before he got to the part where you actually pay.
The pen sits between the chillers and the pick-and-mix, marshalled by a high-vis kid with a clipboard. Anyone who's spent five minutes on a real site knows what a clipboard means: someone with an office has had an idea, and the rest of us are paying for it.
Sparkie Damo Whareaitu, in for smoko supplies before a job out at Linton, was not impressed. "I've got two blokes on the clock waiting on a sausage roll and a Mountain Dew. Now I'm queueing to queue. Tell me how that's a fucking saving."
The clipboard kid, who looked about nineteen and like he'd rather be anywhere else, said he was just doing what the duty manager told him. Fair enough. A duty manager, when asked, said the trial was about "managing peak flow" and would be reviewed "in due course" — which is corporate for never.
By 11am the queue for the queue had its own queue, forming back past the $4.99 bread and curling toward the carpark. Damo's pie was cold by the time he paid for it. The two blokes on the clock are, at time of filing, still on the clock.
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Reader Letters
Garry (Halswell)
Wouldn't have happened in '94. We had standards back then, not this furniture nonsense.
ropeable_dave
mate '94 was thirty years ago what are you on about
MumOf3_Riccarton
Honestly fair enough. Council inorganic is Thursday and my berm is a war zone anyway.
Margaret_F
Gerald would have sorted it with one phone call to the council.
BarryBishopdale
Bloody typical. And while we are at it, the council has been useless since 1987. Cyclists probably love this.
Margaret_F
Reminds me of Gerald. He would have had opinions about the pallet, I can tell you that.
couchgremlin
Lol
long_winded_garry
I remember when the whole street used to argue about whose turn it was to mow the berm and now we cannot even agree on a mattress without someone invoking the Resource Management Act for forty minutes straight like it is a royal commission.