Pete’s Market is a small local grocery store with only one checkout counter. Assume that shoppers arrive at the checkout lane according to a Poisson probability distribution, with an arrival rate of 15 customers per hour. The checkout service times follow an exponential probability distribution, with a service rate of 20 customers per hour. The manager of Pete’s Market wants to consider one of the following alternatives for improving service. What alternative would you recommend?  a. Hire a second person to bag the groceries while the cash register operator is entering the cost data and collecting money from the customer. With this improved single-server operation, the service rate could be increased to 30 customers per hour. b. Hire a second person to operate a second checkout counter. The two-server operation would have a service rate of 20 customers per hour for each server.

Practical Management Science
6th Edition
ISBN:9781337406659
Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.
Publisher:WINSTON, Wayne L.
Chapter2: Introduction To Spreadsheet Modeling
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Pete’s Market is a small local grocery store with only one checkout counter. Assume that shoppers arrive at the checkout lane according to a Poisson probability distribution, with an arrival rate of 15 customers per hour. The checkout service times follow an exponential probability distribution, with a service rate of 20 customers per hour.

The manager of Pete’s Market wants to consider one of the following alternatives for improving service. What alternative would you recommend? 

a. Hire a second person to bag the groceries while the cash register operator is entering the cost data and collecting money from the customer. With this improved single-server operation, the service rate could be increased to 30 customers per hour.

b. Hire a second person to operate a second checkout counter. The two-server operation would have a service rate of 20 customers per hour for each server.

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