Consumer

Shopping. Carrefour tells you how much time you have to wait in line

Ongoing restrictions have brought back to Polish stores a phenomenon that has long been unseen – queues at the entrance

Carrefour decided to help those who do not want to wait to enter the store. Retail network uses widely available Google data. On the store’s website, you can quickly see waiting time estimates, check historical data, and thus plan your next visit to periods of reduced popularity. This is not only a huge convenience for customers, but also a sign of responsibility – after all, the smaller the queue, the higher the chance that you will do your shopping quickly and without compromising your health.

It is also an excellent opportunity to take a closer look at Google’s specifications…

…and check what stores’ traffic data the Mountain View giant has:

Popular times graph: Shows how busy your location typically is during different times of the day. Popular times are based on average popularity over the last several weeks. Popularity for any given hour is shown relative to the typical peak popularity for the business for the week. For example, in the image below, 8:00PM-9:00PM on Saturday is one of the more popular times of the week for this business.

Live visit data: Shows how active your location is right now. Live visit data is updated in real time and overlaid on the popular times graph. For example, in the image below, the highlighted section of the graph represents how active your location is right now compared to its usual level of activity.

Visit duration: Shows how much time customers typically spend at your location. Visit duration estimates are based on patterns of customer visits over the last several weeks.

Wait time estimates: Shows how long a customer would have to wait before receiving service during different times of the day, as well as the peak wait time for each day of the week. The displayed wait time is based on patterns of customer visits over the last several weeks. Wait time estimation differs for different business types. For instance, a sit-down restaurant’s wait time reflects how long customers wait before being seated. Whereas, a grocery store’s wait time reflects how long customers wait to check out their items.