The 12-second checkout: anatomy of a café morning rush
How many seconds does a single checkout take in a café morning rush, and where do those seconds go? Let's model a typical morning flow second by second: where guests leave the queue, and which seconds good design can genuinely win back.
Checkout time in a café between 08:00 and 10:00 is a different problem from the rest of the day. Once the queue crosses a psychological threshold, people simply don't join it — and the customer you lost never shows up in any report.
Where the 12 seconds go
- 1Item selection and entry: 4.8s
- 2Modifications / adding a note: 1.9s
- 3Choosing a payment method: 1.2s
- 4Card tap and authorisation wait: 3.4s
- 5Receipt and handover: 1.1s
Which seconds are winnable and which aren't
Most of the 3.4 seconds spent waiting on card authorisation sits with the bank and cannot be shortened in software. The 4.8 seconds in item selection, by contrast, is entirely an interface question: in most cafés the bulk of morning sales comes from a handful of items — the top 9 sellers typically carry around three quarters of the flow.
Moving the morning menu onto its own screen layout wins seconds per cashier without a single piece of hardware changing — the cheapest speed-up is almost always the screen layout.
Practical takeaways
- Set up a time-based screen layout — don't use the same ordering in the morning and the afternoon.
- Keep the top 9 sellers on one screen, reachable without scrolling.
- Put frequently used notes on preset buttons; free-text entry is the most expensive interaction there is.
- Define a threshold rule that opens a second terminal once the queue passes 5 people.
