The supermarket gives every cashier a queue; the airport runs one snake line feeding every desk. Same staff, same arrivals, same load — wildly different waits. Separate lines waste capacity: a server stands idle while the queue next door is five deep, and the line you've joined can't borrow anyone else's slack. One shared line never lets a server idle while anyone waits, and the math says how much that's worth — at the defaults below, about 5× less time in line, most of what a mythical cashier four times as fast would buy, with no mythical hardware.
| Workers | Separate lines | One snake line | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 22m 40s | 10m 25s | 2.2× |
| 3 | 22m 40s | 6m 30s | 3.5× |
| 4you | 22m 40s | 4m 36s | 4.9× |
| 6 | 22m 40s | 2m 46s | 8.2× |
| 8 | 22m 40s | 1m 55s | 12× |
| 12 | 22m 40s | 1m 6s | 21× |
The separate-lines column never moves: splitting the arrivals across more lines splits the capacity to match, so at the same per-server load twelve queues of one wait exactly as long as one queue of one — adding tellers each with their own line never shortens the wait. All the gain sits in the shared column, and it grows with both team size and load: big, busy teams have the most to win by merging. The dashed fast server still wins door-to-door, since it also serves each customer in a fraction of the time — but on time spent waiting the snake edges past even it. The snake's honest costs: nobody gets to pick the fast cashier or the short line, and the one queue everyone shares looks dauntingly long even when it's moving quickly.