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Cameras at the Couche-Tard convenience store at McGill University in Montreal watch customers as they shop, marking where they go, what they look at, and how long it takes them to get in and get out. The store is part of a laboratory, where professors in business and computer engineering study the ways shoppers move, charting the natural flow of a convenience store the way a paddler would chart a set of rapids.
The hope, at least one of them, is to find the pinch points, the hazards and eddies in the stream, from door to cash register, and eliminate them. The assumption inherent in this experiment has been a bedrock principle of the convenience store industry for decades: customers have somewhere better to be. The store is just a stop on the way.