In a Starbucks store a cashier taken an average of 5 minutes to handle a request. The salary of the cashiers is $6 per hour and average of 10 customers per hour visit the store. The customer lose $10/hour waiting in the system. The store is investigating two alternatives to improve their system. Your job is to evaluate these options and select the best alternative. c. Add a helper with the cost of $4 per hour which improve the service time to 4 minutes (instead of 5 minutes) d. Or change the current system to an M/M/2 system. Adding a new station equipment (not including the staffing cost) will cost the store $1000/year. (assume 365 days/year, and 8 working hours/day)
Expert Answer
Comparison of the two systems c and d is as follows
It is clear from the above analysis that option (c) is more cost effective, if we consider the total cost of servers, and waiting cost of total time spent by customer in system. Therefore the best alternative is (c)