The half-time queue is a menu problem, not a staffing problem

Adding tills to a slow concession stand speeds nothing up if every order still takes ninety seconds to assemble.

Add tills. Add staff. The line still does not move, and everybody blames the students working the counter.

They are not the problem. A concession stand at half time is a queuing system with a fixed service window of about twelve minutes and a demand curve that arrives almost entirely in the first four. Whether that system copes depends on one number, which is how long a single transaction takes from the customer reaching the counter to walking away with the goods. Everything else is secondary, including how many people are behind the counter, because if each transaction takes ninety seconds then four servers deliver a customer every twenty-two seconds and the queue behind them grows regardless.

So look at what fills the ninety seconds. A menu with eighteen items, three of which need assembly. A customer who begins deciding at the counter rather than in the queue. A payment step. A hot item that has to be retrieved from a unit behind the server. A drinks pour done to order. Each of those is five to twenty seconds and they compound.

The fixes are boring and they work. Cut the menu at the busiest stands to four items that can be pre-assembled and handed over in one motion. Put prices and options where the queue can read them thirty feet back, so decisions happen while people are walking. Pour drinks in advance and accept some waste, because the waste costs less than the sale you lost to somebody who gave up and went back to their seat. Separate payment from collection so the two do not block each other.

Cashless helped, though not for the reason people say. It did not speed up the tap, which was never slow. It removed change, which removed the conversation about change, and conversation is the real time sink at a counter.

There is a decent counter-argument that a wider menu increases the average spend per customer, and it does, per transaction. It also reduces the number of transactions you can complete, and at a half-time rush the binding constraint is throughput. Sell fewer things to more people.

The clubs that get this right stop measuring sales per stand and start measuring the number of people served in the first six minutes.

Everybody else buys another till and wonders why the queue looks the same.