Atlantic Video, a small video rental store in Philadelphia, is open 24 hours a day, and-due to its proximity to a major business school-experiences customers arriving around the clock. A recent analysis done by the store manager indicates that there are 20 customers arriving every hour, with a standard deviation of interarrival times of 3 minutes. This arrival pattern is consistent and is independent of the time of day. The checkout is currently operated by one employee, who needs an average of 2.55 minutes to check out a customer. The standard deviation of this check-out time is 3 minutes, primarily as a result of customers taking home different numbers of videos.
(a) If you assume that every customer rents at least one video (i. e., has to go to the checkout), what is the average time a customer has to wait in line before getting served by the checkout employee (i. e., waiting time in queue)?
(b) If there are no customers requiring checkout, the employee is sorting returned videos, of which there are always plenty waiting to be sorted.
How many videos can the employee sort over an 8-hour shift (assume no breaks) if it takes exactly 1.5 minutes to sort a single video? Hint: You need to calculate the % of time that the employee is not serving a customer, i. e., idling (think about the meaning of utilization). Then, the total idle time in an 8-hour shift equals (8 hours)*(% of idle time). From there, you can get how many videos on average the employee can sort during an 8-hour shift.
(c) What is the average number of customers who are at the checkout desk, either waiting or currently being served?