A number of empirical studies have concluded that the customer's attribution of the cause of a delay significantly affects its emotional consequences (see Taylor, 1994; Tom and Lucey , 1995). According to these surveys, customers are more dissatisfied with longer-than-expected waits caused by difficulties that the store could have remedied (e.g. inefficient checkout staff, understaffing, failure to provide express checkouts) than with delays due to external factors such as random variations in the store. crowds, breakdowns, time of day (some periods are necessarily busier than others) or even the presence of customers with large quantities of shopping. This was especially true if little effort on the part of the service provider was required to improve the situation and/or if the problem causing the delay was frequent. It therefore appeared that the reasons for a long queue were major determinants of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and not just the length of the delay. The Psychology of Queue Combining Queue combining has proven not to be a good technique for managing lines at grocery stores and supermarkets. Studies have shown that while combining queuing has been effective in some service organizations, these techniques have been negative in grocery stores. Among the factors causing delays for customers waiting in line at grocery store checkouts is management's attempt to combine lines. Contrary to common calculations, there is reason to believe that combining lines, particularly customer lines at grocery checkout lines, can sometimes be counterproductive. Rothkopf and Rech (1987), in their seminar, saw a participant cite the practice of combining...... middle of paper ...... e service more valuable and was willing to pay significantly more for it when he discovered there were more people behind the positions reserved for them. There is a universal human tendency to know oneself through comparison with others (Gilbert, Price, & Allan, 1995). Customers at checkout tend to compare their position to that of other customers. However, seeing people behind is somewhat comforting because "there are people in a worse situation than me", which makes the experience less painful. The study identified three sets of factors (queue factors, personal factors, and situational factors) that could shape the extent of social comparisons, each of which was tested. Hkust and Hkust (2002) indicated that limited research studies have been conducted to determine how service expectations can be controlled. To control customer waiting time,