“I can’t live by your rules” The rest of you, of course, should.
Would you rather have someone with 25 packets of koolaid packets in front of you in the 10 item express lane or someone with 10 different coded fruits and vegetables?
Koolaid. They have labels and bar codes.
The lane is open… use it.
The road is there to be used, not sit there vacant.
No the lane is there should it be needed for you to take that long to get over. Its intent is to facilitate the merging of traffic from one lane into the other, not to provide a new lane for traffic to enter. This is also why they put the signs warning of the ending well before the end- to encourage you to move over as soon as there is an opportunity.
It is hoped by traffic engineers (and people who don’t think their time to get to a destination is more important than everyone else’s) that the traffic will be able to merge at full speed long before the lane runs out and that there are ultimately no cars there at the end point.
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Obviously you are not familiar with I-77 through Northern Mecklenburg County.
You can keep arguing your point, but you’re wrong.
But congrats on your imaginary award for waiting longer and creating more traffic.
Hey, don’t worry the state can just add more free lanes if the traffic becomes too congested, right?
Exactly, we can drive on the free lanes, on our way to our free college classes, while thinking about our free health care! 
Zippering is definitely more efficient if people do it and I don’t have a problem with zippering with legitimate merging traffic as I said earlier. We’re not talking about that. But you should not enter into the merge lane to drive to the front and jump people, creating a need for more merging. That’s common sense. What you provided also doesn’t argue against the point of “you should merge if there’s an open spot earlier” without slowing down. But continue to argue a different point. Yeah, clearly if I block someone from merging, it slows down the merge line, but I’m going to do it if I see you enter into the merge lane and gun it to try to jump 6 cars and create a need for merging that you didn’t previously have.
I doubt they’d do a silly thing like give some foreign company exclusive rights and agree to withhold any new lane construction for years!
Merging early is idiotic. I’ve had the occasional guy “block” me. I just hit the shoulder and go around the a-hole. Also, on the 10 items or less question. Totally depends on how crowded the store is. I’ve had cashiers usher me to that lane even though I had 2x or more.
if you see a spot to merge before the very end of the merge lane, go ahead and merge early. If I see people pass up on the gaps, I’m very likely to not let them in.
Have I done the opposite, sure. But I understand why sometimes people don’t let me over too.
Hey, if you came in needing to merge, I wouldn’t be blocking you. If I saw you jump over just to pass people, I’d make sure you couldn’t- you’d be the a-hole in that situation. This happens in a specific place in DC I have to go through constantly. One lane comes in and has about a 3/4 mile before it runs out. Only about 8 cars typically come in and need to merge. A lot of people trying to improve their position jump over and probably 3-4x as many now have to merge in the next half mile, creating a cluster-f$&@. People have blocked them enough to where it’s becoming such a faux pas that people have stopped doing it as much. My solution is simply to move right and not deal with it, at this point.
As to the other question, just today I had a woman direct me to the 10 item or less line and I had probably 20 things in the cart. Wouldn’t head there on my own, though.
Unfortunately, I was a lone cart wrangler. Not much fun and this was back in the day before the automatic cart pushers that some stores have today. lol.
As for self checkout, there are many grocery stores that have belts instead of the single station for checking out large quantities of groceries. However, I feel like I am taking someone’s job when I go through those so I just don’t unless I have 1 item and I am in a big hurry.
The above post citing articles touting the “zipper merge” should have pointed out that the system works if there is signage telling folks to stay in two lanes and “merge here, take turns” Such signage is lacking in my state (North Carolina) and the result is chaos. Although the last minute merge may be efficient in the abstract, the problem is that human beings seldom think rationally, especially when behind the wheel and irritated that one lane is closed.
On a side note, it would be wonderful if construction workers would remove the “lane closure ahead” signs when the lane opens up and not leave the sucker up for three days after the work is completed.
clt hopes the best for our cusa friends reading this chat page. Not a lot of traffic in southern miss or marshal
The problem with merge lanes is traffic engineers aren’t able to properly account for non-cooperative game theory. Basically, people like NotSoNewNiner are willing to punish themselves and others if they perceive someone is acquiring an advantage that would be otherwise beneficial to the collective whole. We need autonomous vehicles.
A true autonomous vehicle would evaluate the situation and would likely go around the slower traffic and merge in at the last moment.