03 Mar 07 Post Office Eliminates Long Waits by Removing Clocks

I’m sure this story will be blogged to death before I can hit publish but I just can’t resist! Some things just never cease to amaze me.

FORT WORTH — The missing clock didn’t stop postal customer Al Cunningham from noticing the amount of time spent waiting for service.

“It’s always long here,” said Cunningham, 49, an insurance adjuster and former postal employee who was standing in line at the Watson Post Office in Fort Worth.

The Watson Post Office is one of the nation’s 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a “retail standardization program” launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions.

“We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock,” said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

At the Fort Worth post office, the hook that once held up the small battery-powered clock now protrudes from a plaster wall. The clock was taken down months ago.

A customer-service expert at Texas A&M University was not impressed with the decision to take down the timepieces.

“It’s silly,” said Leonard Berry, holder of the M.B. Zale Chair in Retail and Marketing Leadership. “I guess they think people don’t have watches.”

Now to be fair, removing the clocks will likely change the perception of wait time for some folks. For others they may miss an appointment because they waited in line too long or simply skip the process all together.

Time has certainly become a precious resource for most people. Unfortunately the business community has been slow to respond–at least in a balanced way. Take your local family medical practitioner. They expect their patients to arrive promptly for their appointments yet they feel completely comfortable leaving the same patients sit in a waiting room for 45 minutes past the appointment time without an acknowledgment or explanation. The message they send is simple. Our time is important but yours is not. No I’m not bitter ;-)

Tags: Interior Design, Psychology, User Experience