Customers who feel they have been waiting too long become annoyed, and annoyed customers are rarely satisfied with their overall shopping experience.  The most obvious way to eliminate this problem is to reduce the amount of time that customers actually have to wait, but another approach is to make wait times seem shorter than they actually are.  Along these lines, managers understand how to make time pass more quickly by distracting customers from thinking about the wait period.  Queuing areas at banks provide television programming and promotional material to distract customers from thinking about the waiting time.  Supermarkets display magazines and impulse products near check out areas to draw attention away from the expiration of time.  These kinds of practices are consistent with attentional models of perceived duration, which hold that the less customers think about the passage of time, the shorter a given interval will seem.

However, a second, less intuitive class of theories, called discrete events models, posit that customers often retrospectively estimate wait periods by recalling a sequence of events and using this information to reconstruct the interval.  This suggests that the very tactics that make time pass more quickly in some instances, may actually make wait periods seem longer when customers retrospectively estimate duration.  Two experiments demonstrate that playing familiar atmospheric music can increase or decrease perceived duration, depending on whether individuals are predisposed to monitor the passage of time during the target interval.

In the first experiment, estimated duration was shorter when familiar as opposed to unfamiliar music was played, but only for respondents waiting for an upcoming task to begin; music had little or no effect on respondents engaged in a memory task during the interval.  In the second experiment, respondents waiting idly again reported shorter estimates of duration when they heard familiar as opposed to unfamiliar music, but only when they heard a sufficient number of songs during the interval.  On the other hand, respondents engaged in a memory task reported longer estimates of duration when they heard familiar as opposed to unfamiliar music, but again only when they heard a sufficient number of songs.  These results are consistent with attentional (i.e., waiting condition) versus discrete events (i.e., memory task condition) models of duration judgments, respectively.

These findings are important because managers do not necessarily understand the implications of discrete events models.  Television programming near bank queues may reduce perceived duration by drawing attention away form the passage of time.  But if customers become aware of multiple commercial breaks, they may well reason that they have been waiting too long.  Liking, using music to distract customers placed on-hold may be an effective technique, unless they note the number of songs played, and infer that the wait time has been excessive.   

The implication of discrete events models is that managers must use stimuli or tasks that either (a) cannot be quantified as distinct events, or (b) do not correspond to known durations.  With respect to the first principle, this research suggests that the music on-hold problem can be solved by playing unfamiliar music that cannot easily be counted as distinct songs.  The latter principle suggests that the distracting stimuli should not suggest a standard interval of time.  Television programming has commercial breaks, and customers are likely to possess implicit theories for the timing of these breaks.   On the other hand, an hour of video programming with no commercial breaks would eliminate potential discrete events heuristics.  So, attention diverting tactics must be selected carefully if managers are to avoid the pitfalls of discrete events duration judgments in customer wait settings.