What Is Occupied vs Unoccupied Waiting Time?

By Ali Shahi | August 9, 2026
A woman sitting alone on a bench against a plain stone wall, looking down at a phone in her hands, with a bin and a tall planter nearby

An illustrative scene. A tyre-fitting bay on a Saturday morning: six chairs, a coffee machine, and a wall-mounted screen playing the news with the sound off. Nobody looks up at it. It’s there because a wait with something in it is supposed to feel shorter than a wait with nothing in it. That idea has…

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How Long Will Customers Wait Before Leaving?

By Ali Shahi | August 3, 2026
An empty metal shopping trolley standing alone on paving slabs beside a plain grey and dark metal wall, with nobody in sight

No published study measures how long a shop, café or salon customer waits before walking out. Leaving gets counted in hospitals and on phone lines, and almost nowhere else. So the honest answer has to be built from those places, and what they measure turns out not to be the same behaviour. Where leaving is…

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Why Does Waiting Feel Longer Than It Is?

By Ali Shahi | July 31, 2026
Three empty moulded plastic seats on rusted steel frames against a pale blue-green wall, a single black seat set apart from two faded beige ones

In a 2023 study at a Chinese eye clinic, how long people thought they had waited predicted how satisfied they were. How long they actually waited had no direct effect (P = .365, Medicine (Baltimore), 2023). Two clocks run in every waiting room, and only one of them reached the survey. That split is the…

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