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Waiting in checkout lines in grocery stores is a necessary but undesirable activity that customers must undertake to complete their purchases. Customers report great dislike for waiting in grocery checkout lines (Caballero et al., 1985). Although the average checkout time has declined from 6.5 minutes in l975 to 4.38 minutes today (Alcott, l991), thanks in large part to the increasing usage of scanning technology, as well as the addition of customized waiting lines such as various types of express lines, the checkout wait has remained a long-standing necessary irritant.A 1990 survey by the Food Marketing Institute (Alcott, 1991) reported that 89% of the shoppers interviewed indicated that a fast checkout was important, while only 69% of the same shoppers reported that stores met their expectations. Thus, despite supermarkets' efforts, and large expenditures on technological improvements to speed up the checkout process, almost one customer in four remains dissatisfied. Time seems to be the factor most critical to customers' shopping experiences, not just in grocery stores but in retail outlets in general (Peritz, 1993). Some consumers dislike waiting in line so much that they hire people to wait in lines for them (Geist, 1984;Guirl, 1986).Research studies indicating a negative relationship between long waiting time and consumer satisfaction (Chebat and Filiatrault, 1993;Katz et al., 1991) demand that management be ever alert to strategies to decrease waiting time in line. Management can institute operational techniques such as providing more checkout personnel and more equipment to decrease customer waiting time in line. However, there are obvious limitations to decreasing customer objective waiting time in line through operational management techniques. For example, physical space limits the maximum number of check stands possible in a retail outlet and management cannot determine in advance customers who might need special time-consuming attention and thereby increase the waiting time for all the customers following him or her.An alternative to operations management is perception management (Dube-Rioux et al., 1988;Katz et al., 1991), which attempts to reduce the customer's perception of the length of the waiting time in line without affecting the customer's actual or objective waiting time in line. This approach recognizes that there may not necessarily be a one-to-one correspondence between managing the actual waiting time and consumer satisfaction. Perception management requires that management understand the psychology of the wait (Larson, 1987).In general, a better understanding of the customer's experience in waiting lines would provide management with valuable information to determine when operations management techniques or perception management would 20

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Reports on a study designed to analyse the effectiveness of real and created spokespersons in advertisements. Compares male and female spokespersons′ effectiveness by audience gender. Concludes that celebrities can be used to gain attention and maintain sales, while created spokespersons′ effectiveness is in establishing a lifelong link with the product.

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