Smoothing Out the Shocks
A coat check worth checking out
I am neither an owner, investor, nor proprietor of any establishment where a coat check is employed. But when I encounter great design I take notice. And as Roman Mars taught me, you should too.
Those of you in warmer climes may be less familiar with the winter-time ritual at indoor entertainments, where you deposit the outer layers of armour that protect you from sleet, ice, and other soul-crushing, sub-zero precipitations. The little coat check window tends to open onto a glorified closet (or at larger venues, a very glorified closet) where a bored clerk takes your parka, takes your money, and gives you a little sweepstakes ticket in return. Like this: 🎟️ . (You Texan readers may have a similar arrangement with your guns. You know what I’m talking about.)
The standard coat check system probably hasn’t changed in a hundred years, and serves an important function: allowing you coolly move through the space (in all the various meanings of that word). But two things go wrong at coat checks.
Firstly, there’s the low-probability / high-consequence wrong-going of your coat (or gun) not being there when you retrieve it. That sucks, and that’s all I have to say about that.
Secondly, there’s the other nearly-certain-and-very-annoying thing that happens almost every night, when a mass of hundreds or thousands of people want their armour & guns back and the three or seven or twelve people in that glorified closet are completely incapable of dealing with the rush.
The simple system endures a mighty shock, and although it rarely breaks, it grinds down to a painful halt.
You know the drill: you stand in line while some poor soul sweats, running back and forth between ticket holders and parkas (and rifles) and back again. You wait so long that you curse yourself for ever using the coat-check and vow never to use it again. Future coat-check sales are always down, at least at this moment.
Imagine my surprise, when on a cold Canadian night in a concert venue on the east end of Toronto, I encountered what amounted to the return of the Messiah, at least when it comes to coat checks.
Fasten your seatbelts, you are about to be enlightened.
The drop-off experience is much of what you’d expect. They were also selling drinks and pretzels there. Early evidence of an enterprising mind at work.
The magic took hold at the end of the show, and this is magic in the sense of a brilliantly designed system that I’m going to dismantle, not the sort of magic best left alone. There’s something to be learned here, whether or not you’re in the business of coat (or gun) deposits and their reliable return.
Where does the coat-check lineup come from? Where does any lineup or lag come from? When two parts of a system are moving at different tempos, things get wonky. When you present your 🎟️ ticket 🎟️ at the little window, there’s something between 30 seconds to 5 minutes of searching for your article, whether poncho or pistol.
Productivity experts like ol’ Frederick Taylor could come in and devise smarter numbering systems or introduce some sacred geometry to the arrangement of the coat racks. Such fools would only be working at the level of symptoms. The genius behind this coat check had dismantled the system far more deeply.
Upon leaving the auditorium, you join a lineup that isn’t moving quickly, but never seems to stop. It’s taking you toward a first window, which you didn’t notice on your way in because at that point it served no purpose. You show the first clerk your 🎟️ ticket 🎟️ , they shout the number over their shoulder and behind them, a bunch of runners scramble about like lemurs in high branches, each one assigned to a section of the racks. Someone locates the coat, and now comes the coup de grâce: they hand the coat – on its hangar – to a person standing on a ladder, who loads the hangar onto a metal cable that starts at the ceiling and runs at a 45° angle to the window where you originally deposited your jacket (or firearm). The coat slides down this cable and lands at the back of a pile of about 5 other coats, which have very recently undergone this journey and belong to the 5 people in front of you, in order.
Meanwhile, the person who deposited their ticket into this frenzy of activity has been slowly walking up to the original window where they dropped off their coat hours earlier. They’ve been walking between window #1 and window #2 for maybe a minute, which has been sufficient time for the team inside to have found their jacket, handed it to the ladder person, and sent it down the zipline where it’s waiting. One final clerk grabs the jackets (in order), confirms the ticket number of the now-passing patron, hands them their coat and tells them to F off.
The line never stops moving.
Encountering this two-stage coat-check blew me away. Not to make a firearm joke here. The principle behind good design for crowds is that you don’t want bottlenecks and should design them out of existence. If you have a flow of anything (people, water, work, autographs to sign), you should work to spread it out so it doesn’t suddenly get angry, tip the metal barricades, and start rioting. There’s something in this system for everyone.
Beyond that, it’s a brilliant design. I was joking about Roman Mars at the top of this, whose 99% Invisible podcast is certainly one of the GOATs. The title says it all – most of the world is invisible, and I’d sure as hell include the annoying coat check experience under that invisibility cloak.
Yet some wizard paid close enough attention to see an opportunity, and simply by opening a second window and installing an aircraft cable between a ceiling and a wall (and organizing a highly-coordinated team that probably rivals Navy SEALs in their discipline, focus, and toughness) allowed the dreaded coat check line to move nearly as quickly as the fools who were either braving the winter in a t-shirt, or had worn their parkas through the whole show.
And you should’ve seen the tempo from the coat-runners. It was like they were playing a sport.