Question

Supermarket checkout lines all tend to be roughly the same length. Why is that? Explain your answer using one or more concepts related to perfect competition and/or monopoly. (Note that this question is about the checkout lines within a particular store – the question is not about the number of supermarkets or grocery stores.)

Answer 1

Supermarket checkout lines all tend to be roughly the same length. This is because there is perfect competion among them. One of the characteristics of a perfectly competitive market is that there are many producers of the product. Here the product is the billing of the goods which is being provided by the billing counters. There are many billing counters in a particular store. And since all the billing counters are providing a standardized service of billing of the goods, the customer has no incentive of choosing one counter over the other. Hence all the lines are almost always equal.