The queue becomes longer, with fewer tills being used and one worker appearing to be doing three different jobs. Although the customer is not charged extra on the receipt, this does not mean that the waiting time is free.
The queue becomes longer and the register stays closed. An employee is attempting to put goods on the shelves, answer questions and give assistance at the checkout counter all at the same time. Customers have to stand there for ten, fifteen or twenty minutes wondering why a company making billions of dollars cannot have another person working at the checkout. Beneath that frustration lies an economic question: how much of a customer’s time can a company take before the money saved on labor starts to cost it more through lost business?
More recent data make that question very relevant. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s most recent analysis of CEO pay, the chief executives of the 350 largest U.S. companies earned an average of $27.9 million in realized compensation in 2025, which represents a 14 per cent increase on the year before. The pay of these CEOs was about 325 times that of a typical worker in their respective industries. The ratio was approximately 21 to 1 in 1965, according to EPI.
Meanwhile, retailers are discovering methods of increasing their output even though they are using fewer labor hours. The 2025 retail productivity report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that retail output rose by 2.5% in 2025 while hours worked decreased by 0.4%. Labor productivity went up by 2.9% and unit labor costs fell by 0.7%. This fact does not mean that any specific 20-minute checkout line was intentionally set up by management. Rather, it illustrates the wider economic motivation: that retailers are being able to produce more output for each hour of labor they buy. (BLS)
And if labor is treated as an expense but the time customers wait is not, an important thing occurs. The company covers the employee’s hour; you have to pay for your own.
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The figure for the national CEO is impressive, but the individual retail companies illustrate just how big the gap can be. In its fiscal 2025 proxy statement, Walmart stated that CEO Doug McMillon’s annual total compensation amounted to $27,408,854, as compared to $29,469 for its median associate, which gives a company-reported ratio of 930 to 1. The filing for fiscal 2025 from Target showed that the CEO’s compensation was $21,830,088 and that the median team-member compensation was $27,506, resulting in a ratio of 794 to 1. Target pointed out that its median employee was part time. (SEC filing)
Dollar General is also an example of this. According to its 2026 proxy statement, the median employee at the company, described as a full-time store associate, was paid a total compensation of $18,876, whereas CEO Todd Vasos received $8,163,197, which gives a ratio reported by the company of 432 to 1. (SEC filing)
One should not carelessly compare these company ratios. Although the SEC’s pay-ratio rule allows companies some freedom when it comes to determining the median worker, there are considerable differences in workforce composition. A retailer with a large number of part-time employees will obviously differ from a company which is dominated by engineers or other highly paid professionals. Yet the filings do show something important regarding the way compensation is distributed among large corporations.
On the retail floor the difference is more noticeable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the median wage of cashiers was $15.81 per hour in May 2025, whereas the median hourly earnings of retail salespersons were around $17.03. It is therefore possible for the saving of even a relatively small number of employee hours across thousands of stores to have significance at a corporate level. However, such savings do not mean that the work vanishes. In some cases the savings are absorbed by technology. In others they are taken up by improvements in productivity. In some cases another employee ends up with more tasks. At times the customer has to wait.
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Time is not generally considered to be worthless by economists. An NBER study which looked at more than 14 million observations from Lyft customers estimated the value of consumers’ time at about $19 per hour in that situation. Although the study focused on ride-hailing and not on shopping in retail stores, its figure of $19 should not therefore be applied to every minute spent in a checkout line. However, the economic principle in question is significant: waiting has an opportunity cost.
A person who is standing in line cannot at the same time be working, driving home, preparing dinner, spending time with their family or shopping elsewhere. Although this time is not shown as an extra charge on the receipt it has still been used. Retail researchers have discovered that companies can ultimately cover the cost of excessive waiting as well. A study which appeared in Management Science looked at real retail queues by using video data and point-of-sale information. The researchers found that the impact of waiting on customers’ purchasing decisions was nonlinear, shoppers reacting strongly to the visible length of the queue and longer queues becoming more and more discouraging.
This situation means that every service business has to make a calculation. Increasing the number of staff leads to higher payroll costs right away, while reducing staffing can lower these expenses, but if the level of service drops too much the company runs the risk of losing customers and having purchases abandoned. The troubling aspect is that the optimal point might end up lying there.
The financially efficient level of staffing for a company need not be the same as the level that customers prefer. Even if cutting an employee saves more than the amount the company loses when people refuse to wait, the spreadsheet may still recommend the leaner schedule. Although the inconvenience is real, a large part of its cost is borne by someone who is not included in the payroll system. The customer.
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A important counterpoint is that a long queue does not necessarily show that corporations are greedy or that they have deliberately understaffed. The operation of stores has to cope with unexpected surges in customers, employee callouts, staff turnover, difficulties in hiring, the necessity of training and mistakes in scheduling. The self-checkout machinery is capable of breaking down. A store that is initially quiet can suddenly become very busy. Retail is still a huge industry and in 2025 employed approximately 16.1 million workers according to the more comprehensive BLS productivity measure. Effectively managing thousands of locations is much more complicated than merely dividing executive pay by the hourly wage of a cashier.
Technology actually does lead to higher productivity. A worker who has access to better inventory systems, automated ordering, handheld checkout devices, and improved logistics can achieve more than one who uses the older systems. The fact that output per labour hour is higher is not by itself proof of exploitation. Indeed, productivity growth is one of the main reasons why economies become richer. But that counterargument does not eliminate the underlying question.
The figures from the BLS indicate that retail output increased even though the total number of hours worked fell in 2025; EPI’s data show that pay at the top of major corporations rose sharply; corporate filings reveal huge compensation gaps at some of America’s most well-known retailers; academic research shows that customers react negatively to long queues; taken together, these facts show a contradiction lurking within a common everyday experience.
Corporations carefully monitor labour costs. They keep records of payrolls by store, together with sales per labour hour, inventory turnover, margins and productivity. The 15 minutes lost by the customer are much more difficult to detect since they never show up as an expense on the company’s income statement. That could be the underlying economics of the current checkout line.
Every time another register is closed, someone saves money and whenever the queue gets longer, someone else has to pay. Your wait might not be shown on the receipt, but in economic terms it wasn’t free.