The two minutes that decide whether a customer comes back

Ask a customer what they remember about a great shopping trip and they'll usually describe something sensory: the way a store smelled, how easy it was to get served, how quickly they were in and out. Ask them what they remember about a bad one, and it's almost always a version of the same complaint. I waited too long, and nobody told me why.

Waiting and scent might seem like an odd pair to put in the same article. In practice, they're the same problem wearing two different outfits. Both are about what a customer feels while they're standing in your store, and both are almost entirely within your control.

Waiting is a psychology problem before it's a logistics one

David Maister's classic analysis of queuing, still cited across service design decades later, makes a point that's easy to forget when you're focused on throughput: how long a wait feels has surprisingly little to do with how long it actually is. Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time. Uncertain waits feel longer than waits with a known endpoint. Unexplained waits feel longer than explained ones. A customer who knows they're fourth in line and expects a seven-minute wait is far more patient than a customer standing in an unmarked huddle with no idea if they're next or forgotten.

That's not a reason to ignore actual wait times. A 2020 Rakuten Ready time study of click-and-collect and curbside pickup found that customers who waited under two minutes were substantially more likely to make a repeat purchase than those who waited longer, a gap far larger than the difference between, say, a three-minute wait and a five-minute one. Speed matters. But speed alone doesn't fix the experience if the customer has no idea what's happening while they wait.

Academic field research backs up the nuance here too. A study on advanced queuing technology found that in low-traffic, short-wait environments, digital queuing tools didn't move the needle on overall satisfaction scores, but customers still rated the experience itself as more effortless, easier, and less stressful. In other words, queuing technology doesn't just need to make waits shorter. It needs to make them legible: a visible number, an accurate estimate, a notification when it's time to come back. That's often the more achievable win, and it's available even in stores where the physical queue itself isn't the bottleneck. None of this requires knowing who any individual customer is. A queue count and an estimated wait work the same way whether it's aggregated store-wide or shown on a ticket, with nothing tied to a shopper's identity.

For a multi-site brand, that means virtual queuing, click-and-collect slots, and booking systems aren't just operational conveniences. They're a direct lever on repeat visits, because they turn an anxious, ambiguous wait into a bounded, explained one.

Scent works on the same principle, from the opposite direction

Where queuing removes a negative, scent adds a positive, but the underlying mechanism is strikingly similar. Multisensory retail research consistently finds that a multi-sensory experience, one engaging more than a single sense, lifts the likelihood a customer returns by around 90% compared with a single-sense experience, according to the 2016 Journal of Retailing meta-analysis referenced across this sprint's other pieces. The same body of research points to scent as a particularly durable channel for that effect: scent-based memories are retained at roughly 35%, against about 5% for visual memory alone, which is part of why a signature scent tends to outlast a signature colour scheme in a customer's mind. A 2025 study of supermarket shoppers in Colombo went further, finding that sensory cues including scent had a significant direct effect on both dwell time and purchasing behaviour, an effect that strengthened further when it produced a genuine emotional response in the customer. All of this holds at the level of the store and the aggregate customer base. None of it requires or implies tracking any individual shopper.

What both bodies of research point to is the same underlying truth: the moments that decide whether a customer stays, buys, and comes back are rarely the big, expensive parts of the store experience. They're the small sensory and procedural details. Was I told how long I'd wait. Did the store feel considered. Was there a signature to the space that made it memorable. None of that requires a redesign. It requires attention to the parts of the experience that are easy to overlook precisely because they're quiet.

Orchestration is the word for getting both right, everywhere

Getting a queue and a scent right in one flagship store is a design decision. Getting them right, consistently, across dozens or hundreds of locations is an orchestration decision, and it only works once there's central control over both. A signature scent set once by head office and left alone will drift out of calibration store by store. A queuing system installed store by store, on whatever budget and vendor a local manager landed on, won't behave the same way twice. The practical version of good looks like this:

Every customer knows where they stand. Whether it's a queue number, a booking confirmation, or a pickup notification, nobody should be left guessing whether they've been forgotten.

The store has a scent identity, not an accidental one. If your stores don't smell like anything in particular, that's not neutral. It's a missed chance to be remembered, and one your competitors may already be taking.

Both are managed centrally, and consistently. A signature scent that's strong in one store and absent in another isn't a signature. A queuing experience that's smooth in the flagship and chaotic in the outer-suburb store isn't consistent. The goal, as always for a multi-site brand, is the same experience wherever the customer walks in.

The takeaway: dwell time and satisfaction are shaped less by grand gestures than by whether a customer felt informed and whether the space felt intentional. Audit your queuing communication and your scent presence in the same breath, because they're solving the same underlying problem.

Sources cited

• Maister, D. (1985, updated commentary 2010s). The Psychology of Waiting Lines. Eight propositions on perceived wait time.
• Rakuten Ready (2020). 2020 Time Study: Order for Pickup. Wait time and customer satisfaction across retail, grocery and QSR.
• Roschk, H., Loureiro, S. M. C., & Breitsohl, J. (2016). Calibrating 30 Years of Experimental Research: A Meta-Analysis of the Atmospheric Effects of Music, Scent, and Color. Journal of Retailing.
• Punchihewa, S. & Jayampathi, E. K. (2025). The Influence of in-store sensory marketing on consumer dwell time and purchasing behavior. Consumer Behavior Review, 9(1).