"Queuing theory" is a growing field of academic study, apparently, and a well-funded one, since there are so many corporations with an interest in maximising queue efficiency; supermarkets, theme parks, vendors of hot cakes. A piece in Popular Mechanics (a racier read than you'd think) lays out some of the jargon: Faffing is the time delay when a person gathers his things after paying at the checkout—an average of 3.17 seconds (I suspect this helps to explain why those one-basket queues never gain you much time), Reneging is when a customer leaves a queue he believes he has spent too much time waiting in (and joins another that moves even more slowly), and the Balking Index is part of an equation that predicts when someone will turn away from a line that he feels is too long. Presumably he does so at y = "Point at which that queue is just about to get much shorter".
Joe Moran has written what sounds like a very good book about queuing and the British, who are of course the masters of this art form.
(h/t The Browser)
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