Houston airport received a lot of complaints about baggage claim wait times. So they decided to go about fixing the problem in a very peculiar way.
Normally, when you set out to fix a problem, the first thing you do isn’t to use what you would think would be a failure to resolve it. But that is exactly what a Houston airport did. Passengers had about a minute walk to get to their luggage, but would have to wait roughly 7 minutes to actually get their bags. Officials decided to move the arrival gates further away from the baggage claim area, resulting in travelers having to walk six times longer to retrieve their things.
You may think this would just cause an even bigger problem, with people then complaining about the long walk. But instead the airport authorities found the complaints dwindled down to nearly zero. M.I.T. operations researcher, Richard Larson, explained why.
“Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself.”
Taking up time by making commuters walk longer gives them the feeling that they don’t have to wait so long. Authorities really found a way to use a failure to bring success!