Coffee Shop Waiting Time Predictor
If you're next in the queue at the handover counter, roughly how long until your coffee's ready? This generates a plausible random scenario for everyone ahead of you and sums up the typical wait.
About this tool
Uses the same typical drink-make times as How Long Will My Coffee Take?. For each person ahead of you, a random number of drinks is generated (weighted so ordering just one drink is most common, two is fairly common, and three is rare), each with a randomly picked drink and size. People waiting at the handover point have already ordered and paid, so only the time to make their drinks is counted. On top of that, every milk-based drink (everything except espresso, americano and iced americano) adds to a running count across the whole queue, and every time that cumulative count reaches another multiple of 5, a further 10 seconds is added to cover opening a new carton of milk — implemented as Math.floor(totalMilkDrinksSoFar / 5) * 10. The source brief described this as happening "for each 5–6 drinks"; this tool uses 5 as the trigger point, applied to the whole queue's running milk-drink count rather than resetting per person. No assumption is made about how many baristas are working or what order they actually make drinks in — this is a simple serial sum of making time plus milk overhead, worked out for 1,000 random mixes of orders to give a typical wait and a likely range. It's a rough guide only.