Is a jealousy issue? Without the second line you were going to take as long as you were. Opening a second line helped people further back catch up and in some cases surpass your speed. Someone else having a quicker experience shouldn't have changed your experience.
I wouldn’t call it jealousy to want everyone to be served in the order they arrived, since that’s obviously the intention of flat unprioritized queues. You can certainly make arguments that FIFO isn’t the best or right way to process a grocery store checkout queue, but for now I’d rather it be implemented well rather than poorly.
maybe it's more of a fairness issue. in theory, the proper way should be to have a single line that funnels to any available lane, so any newcomer would still have to join the same line and not get any advantage over someone who has been waiting.
Wouldn't it average out over time anyway? I.e. sometimes you're unlucky and have to wait twice as long as if you'd arrived to the queue a bit later, sometimes you're lucky and have your wait time cut in half. Over many store trips it's halfway between the one-queue and two-queue processing time.
