When Time Is Money, Will Banks Make Any?

I have seen the future, and it is at the check-out counter. Standing in line at a grocery check-out counter in Park City, Utah, recently, I was reminded how far the grocery business has come in perform the art of waiting in line. To move lines more quickly, most grocery stores today have installed electronic scanning equipment, added card readers to accommodate credit- and debit-card transactions and made the bagging procedure ("Paper or plastic?") simpler and a lot faster. They've mastered the art--and the economics--of waiting in line. Which gets me to a point: Waiting in line at a check-out counter today is a whole lot more fun than waiting in a teller line. Regardless of what line it is, however, Americans don't much like waiting in it. Of all the burdens on their time, people most resent waiting in line, according to a poll reported in the Wall Street Journal. Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they resent waiting in line more than any other drain on their time. Doing household chores placed a distant second, at 21% of those surveyed. I sense that more and more people today are asking themselves: Where is the time going? and How can I get it back? Bankers can learn something from the trend. I remember summer as a time when people could slow down from the more hurried pace of the rest of the year, collect their thoughts a bit and make plans for the fall. I used to be able to read several books in one summer, and I could almost always count on improving my golf score by at least a stroke or two. Now it's tough to find time to finish even one good book a summer. As for the golf game...well, that's another story altogether. There's just no time! But if time is a commodity in our society, then perhaps we'd better start measuring the value of that commodity for our customers. A survey by Sony Electronics a year ago found that American adults are spending more than three times as much leisure time with their families in the home versus out of the home. The average family, reports Sony, spends 35 hours a week of quality time together, 27 of which occur in the home. A study of professional women in Washington, D.C., underwritten by Citibank, found women equally divided on the question: Are you willing to take a cut in pay for more family and personal time? Forty-seven percent said yes, 47% said no. The oldest of the Baby Boomers began turning 50 this year. More and more of them will get more leisure time and more money to spend, predicts "The American Forecaster Almanac 1996. …