Retail Queue Simulator
Simulates a full trading day, second by second — three realistic peak periods, the occasional tricky customer, and whatever chaos you throw at it — to see how your queues actually play out, not just customers divided by opening minutes.
About this tool
Runs a second-by-second simulation of the day you've described, rather than a simple average. Demand is split into three peak periods carrying 70% of your typical customer numbers, with the rest spread thinly across the quieter parts of the day — the typical customer figure you enter is treated as a guaranteed minimum. In High Footfall mode, a visibly long queue also attracts some extra passers-by on top of that minimum ("social proof"), which never happens in Shop mode. About 1 in 20 customers is a genuinely tricky one who takes three times as long as everyone else, and there's always a small, realistic chance of a customer abandoning the queue if it's grown long or they've waited a while. Each run is randomised, like a real trading day — run it again to see the range of outcomes rather than treating one run as a prediction.
- Why do I get a different result every time I run it?
- Because it's a simulation of a day that hasn't happened, not a fixed calculation — customer arrivals, who turns out to be a tricky customer, and whether anyone abandons the queue are all randomised within realistic bounds each time, exactly as a real day would vary.
- How are the chaos scenarios applied?
- Most run as a single realistic-length window during the day (a frozen till for part of the afternoon, a short-handed spell), rather than for the whole day, since that's how these things usually actually happen on a shop floor.