Infinite Scrolling

Saturday 17 August 2019

Liberating technology makes queues disappear

There was a time, not to far back, when buying a train ticket required a trip to the train station and standing in a long and winding queue for hours at times. A large part of the day had to be set aside for this.

Even when computers starting printing tickets the queues remained though the waiting time in the queue became much shorter. You see, before this happened train tickets were little printed cardboard pieces manually checked and punched by the ticket clerk. This took much more time.

The real change happened when we could print our tickets at home from the railways website. This single step liberated time for a large number of people, a huge amount of time.

The train ticket queue disappeared.

The airlines ticket queue was shorter. The ticket was a booklet of leaves made of fine and thin paper with each onward journey appearing on a separate tear away sheet. Online booking changed this and now we print them at home.

The airline ticket queue disappeared.

The bank teller queue would make you wait for withdrawing money.

The ATM made this queue disappear.

Online payment made the bill payment queues disappear.

Hours of waiting time for all of us has disappeared.

This time has been liberated from the queues!




PS.
Also see my blog posts:
We live in a world of apps
Customer experience: a people and technology milieu
Flow of technology changes our lives
Digital markets: when the computers decide
Window to the world: digital access as an enabler
From paper to pixels





1 comment:

  1. Yes,saved time means quality time available! Another benefit is that one doesn't even need to print out the ticket. One can download and keep it on the mobile.

    ReplyDelete

Tenets I followed: Facts not opinion