Putting It in Perspective: 100 Million Customers Served, More Time Saved from Waiting in Line Than All of Recorded History

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We recently announced a major milestone here at QLess: Our customer interaction management platform has saved more than 100 million customers over 5700 years’ time waiting in line. To put in perspective just how long that is, imagine what an individual could have done instead of queuing for 5763 years. If you’d started queuing 5700 years ago, you would have missed out on seeing the Great Pyramids of Giza built, worshipping at Stonehenge, and traveling along the original iteration of the Great Wall of China… with hundreds of years to spare in between. Someone who began queuing 5763 years ago would have been waiting since 3746 BC – Hammurabi didn’t even pen his famous law code until the 18th century BC. And I get frustrated just waiting in line at the grocery store!

waiting-in-long-line.jpg.824x0_q71_crop-scale.jpgIt’s a whimsical way to think about it, perhaps, but imagining all the fascinating events one could have attended instead of standing in line for almost six centuries helps us grasp the scale of this milestone. After all, each one of us waits in lines every day, whether it’s at the pharmacy, the DMV, or your local big-box store. While a few minutes a day may seem small on an individual scale, it adds up to a real drain on our economy: the New York Times estimates that Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year in line. That’s all wasted, non-productive time, by the way.

Everyone always talks about how we’ll all spend months – or even years – stuck in traffic over our lifetimes, and waiting in lines is exactly the same. The difference lies in how easy it is to actually fix the problem. Civil engineers spend years trying to solve traffic jams, but anyone can save people from having to wait in line with QLess’ easy-to-deploy line management solutions.

To put it plainly: It’s 2017, and standing in line really should be a thing of the past. Our mission here at QLess is to turn that “should” into an “is.” Already, QLess has saved over 100 million customers from waiting in physical lines. That’s more than the populations of LA, NY, SF, DC, Chicago, Denver, Boston, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and my native Buenos Aires combined! It’s more people than follow Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Ellen or Barack Obama on Twitter.

You can use your newfound time to sort out your other affairs, take a well-earned breather, and or even spend more time shopping. Businesses also see the benefits of treating their customers with respect: queue management makes staff more productive, increases sales, and improves the customer experience.

Life already offers us enough frustrations. Let’s leverage our modern technology to rid ourselves of the needless frustration of waiting in line.