With Memorial Day Weekend in our rear-view mirror, we are psyched to see what summer has in store. While all of us at Waitlist Me are enthusiastic about not waiting—and making every wait as painless and speedy as possible—we have to admit that we get a kick out of seeing what folks are itching to see and do, no matter how much time they have to spend in line.

What’s cracking us up, making us scratch our heads, and inspiring us to buy tickets this season? Here are the top-five crazy (and crazy-awesome) things people are waiting for this summer:

#1. A bucket of cookies at the Minnesota State Fair

Nearly 2 million people visit the Minnesota State Fair in the Twin Cities every year. The massive fair grounds have everything you could want in a fair, from giant sculptures made out of butter to an ax-throwing contest. They also have Sweet Martha’s famous chocolate chip cookies, available by the bucket-full. Last year, the line for these cookies was 45 minutes long.

#2. A ticket to see Shakespeare

Much ado about nothing? Not so say the theatre fans who wait (and wait and wait) for tickets to see Shakespeare in the Park in New York City. Each year, New York’s Public Theater puts on two shows outside in Central Park, soften starring big-time actors like Morgan Freeman and Anne Hathaway. How long is the wait? Who knows! Some line up the night before the free tickets are distributed.

#3. Exclusive merch at Comic-Con

With so many celebrities making it to San Diego for Comic-Con, you don’t have to be a certified geek to geek out over this event. It’s four days of panels, signing events, screenings, and, of course, all sorts of merchandise you can only get your hands on here. The lines themselves have taken on legendary status. Some of them even have their own Twitter accounts (we’re looking at you, Hall H)!

#4. To watch a little match play at Wimbledon

This summer, we’re certain of exactly one thing: There is no event that takes its lines more seriously than Wimbledon. While the Brits are certainly well-known for their queueing style, only this pinnacle of fastidiousness offers up a 30-page guide to lining up for tickets. Some wait all night (hear ye, hear ye: tents larger than a 2-person are forbidden). Some show up just before dawn, their fingers crossed that they’ll be among the first 500.  

#5. To leave the Nevada desert

If you’re looking for an experience this summer, you can surely find it at Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. In late August, that’s where the Burning Man festival sets up camp. After the titular man is burned—don’t worry, he’s not an actual person—it can take 6 to 8 hours to get out of Black Rock and even longer to get to the nearest city. This annual leaving is so massive that it has its own name: the Exodus.

Is your business ramping up this summer?

Use a waitlist and reservation app like Waitlist Me to manage your queues better and make your customers happier campers, no matter where, when, or why they’re hanging out in line. You can get started for free today and access features including text notifications, smart ETAs, and multi-location management.

These days, we’ve started talking about the world in terms of B.C. and D.C.—that’s “before coronavirus” and “during COVID-19.” Though we are eager to move into the A.C. era (“after coronavirus,” naturally) even the most optimistic projections put that at least 6 months from now.

‘Til then, we’re adapting. For people working from home, that means video conferences at dining room tables. For those who are keeping restaurants, stores, offices, and other essential businesses open, that means embracing new ways of getting the job done.

One of the most popular ways business owners are staying open while minimizing the spread of coronavirus is to embrace touch-free or contact-free service. 

What is touch-free service?

Touch-free service limits the spread of the novel coronavirus by reducing the number of people who touch an item. The danger with this virus is that it’s very contagious. When you decrease how many individuals handle, say, a pizza box, you lessen the risk that one of those individuals will transmit the virus to the recipient—or to another employee who comes into contact with the box.

Implementing touch-free service is a more complex preventative measure than, say, requiring all employees to wear a mask. Going low-contact or contact-free requires business owners and managers to consider their entire workflow from start to finish so they can decide how to best protect themselves, their workers, and their customers.

Tools like Waitlist Me, a waitlist and reservation/appointment app, are one piece of the puzzle. Now, let’s see how that puzzle piece fits into some strategies that can be used across a diverse array of businesses.

Strategies for providing touch-free service using Waitlist Me

Pickup outside – Whether customers are picking up food, medicine, or other items they have ordered, they may not need to come into your building to get them. Waitlist Me can be used to confirm their order with a text message that can also communicate instructions on what to do when they arrive. Customers can reply to texts when they arrive and either wait in their cars or outside the door in a more open area for their orders to be brought to them. With Waitlist Me Pro there is also an option to send open text replies to customer texts for things like clarifying questions or letting them know if more time is needed for their order.   

Limit numbers inside – When allowing people inside to dine, shop, or be treated, Waitlist Me can help avoid crowded waiting areas and limit the number of people in the building. Simply add customers to the waitlist when they arrive and allow them to walk around outside or wait in their car until you are ready for them. They can check their places in line from their phones using the public waitlist feature, and you can press a button to text them when it’s their turn. You can even have your staff greet them outside or add them to the list when they pull into the parking lot. 

Reduce points of contact – There are additional ways to increase safety by cutting down on person-to-person interactions for customers arrivals. Post information on your website or a sign on your door asking customers to call or use the Waitlist Me web widget to add themselves to the waitlist, rather than entering the building to do so in person. The widget can help show how busy you are, so people can have a better idea of when to arrive. Or they can schedule an appointment or reservation that you can approve and manage in the app. With Waitlist Me Pro there are also simple scheduling controls for business hours and hourly availability that can help stagger the number of people visiting your business across the day.  

You don’t have to act like a drill sergeant to bring a touch more productivity to your 9-to-5 life. Whether you’re a manager, a department director, an executive, or a small business owner, you get more done when you aren’t waiting on things holding you up.

Waitlists aren’t just for restaurants. People waste a lot of time waiting around in business environments, even if they aren’t standing in lines. Here are four ways you can put a waitlist app to work in an office setting:

Run a help desk more efficiently

Forget about dragging equipment to a different floor or wondering if the IT guy has read your email yet. A waitlist keeps everyone in the loop and no one standing in line, laptop in hand. Your tech support can send text alerts to employees when it’s their turn, cutting down on dead time spent twiddling their thumbs.

Bonus! Waitlist Me Pro offers analytics that let you check up on different data points, like which employee is spending how much time taking care of which problem. You’ll be able to track your service times—and see if you need to adjust the schedule or size of your team, based on the hours your crew is currently clocking.

Answer “Do you have a minute?” questions

Administrators, HR, designers, unofficial office gurus—there are all sorts of people who field questions from colleagues 24/7. A waitlist gives them an easy way to help out with information requests without derailing projects and meetings.

Bonus! Our public waitlist feature lets staffers check in to see where they are in line, which means no more passive aggressive follow-up emails, check-in calls asking if you’re free in five, or awkward hovering outside your office door. Phew!

Manage office hours with managers, teams, or departments

An open-door policy is great for your office culture but not so hot for productivity. A better choice: consistent office hours. Employees will know when it’s their turn to poke their heads in for advice or project input. Got a line growing outside your office? Waitlist Me can help you wrangle it. Let employees add themselves and then chill at their desks ‘til it’s their turn, without worrying about missing their chance to meet.

Bonus! Waitlist Me works on the web as well as iOS and Android devices. That means it can go wherever you do. Use it in your office on a desktop computer, from a coffeeshop, or wherever else your job takes you.

Oversee on-site employee services and benefits

Everyone loves a perk, whether it’s on on-site yoga studio or food trucks in the parking lot every Wednesday. But sometimes, those perks come with wait times that keep employees at bay. Keep your employees happy—and enjoying the benefits that are part of their compensation package—by employing a waitlist that lets everyone have a go at the good stuff. Waitlist Me lets staffers add themselves to a list from wherever they are, whether they’re at home, on the train, or walking in from the parking deck, making it even easier for them to use the services you offer.

Bonus! With Waitlist Me, a 5-minute wait really is a 5-minute wait. Our app offers wait time estimates based on historical averages, and seeing estimated times next to actuals helps people improve their quote estimates. It’s just one more way we’re helping you and your employees use time wisely.

When we launched NoshList in 2012, we began with a very targeted focus on the restaurant industry and a mission to solve the challenges many restaurants face in managing long wait lines. And it worked. Customizable, easy-to-use and affordable, our wait list app enhanced the customer experience and quickly replaced the antiquated pen and paper lists for our customers.

Over the past two years, NoshList has been used to seat more than 45 million diners, and the new reservations feature helps with a whole new set of scheduling challenges that restaurants face.

Along the way though, we realized that NoshList can be used in a host of other industries. Other types of businesses started using NoshList in ways we hadn’t originally expected, and as they did they asked us for ways to better customize the product for their situations. So little by little we started adding more customization features, and now all kinds of businesses are using NoshList to improve their customers’ wait experience.

Since NoshList can be used on iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, other mobile devices, and even computers, the app can be used just about anywhere. All that’s needed is an Internet connection and a desire to make waits more bearable for customers.

Afterall, when a customer is waiting on anything — from a lane at the bowling alley to a rented boat — the wait can be like an extreme lesson in patience. NoshList works as a way to communicate with waiting parties that their lane, boat or other item is ready.

How about waiting in line for a dressing room? With NoshList, shoppers can simply add their name to the list and then continue to shop while they wait for their dressing room. Once it’s ready, they will receive a text notifying them they’re next in line. It’s the ultimate win-win.

The same ideas apply to anywhere there might be a wait — at the pharmacy, the automotive repair center, the doctor’s office or hair salon and spa.

There are few simple things businesses in other industries can do to best use NoshList. The main thing is to customize the texts that go out when a person is added to any type of wait list and when they are notified. NoshList users can also choose from a number of automated call options. Then for more personalization a business can pre-define the list of the most common notes to appear in the app with the QuickNotes feature. Finally, table numbers can be modified to represent what makes sense for a business. These numbers could represent a salesperson, chair number, rental ID or whatever resource is assigned to your customers.

To learn more, check out our new page on how NoshList is being for different business waitlists across the country.

You’re a small business owner. You shouldn’t have to be a tech whiz. Forget all the training hassles. Forget the painful user manuals. There’s no reason for you to waste your time and money on waitlist management software that’s anything less than plug and play.

Here are seven easy ways to figure out if the tool you’re eyeing is more trouble than it’s worth.

You can’t buy it without talking to a sales person.

If a product is straightforward and user-friendly, it sells itself. You should be able to watch a quick video, then just jump in and start using the product. When a demo from a slick sales rep is required, it’s not the simple solution you’re looking for. Remember: You want to buy the product, not the pitch.

The pricing comes with more fine print than a cell phone contract.

Start-up fees, 24/7 support fees, usage surcharges, complicated pricing tiers, contracts that lock you in for a certain amount of time—these are sales tactics companies use to hook you with a low upfront price and milk you down the line.  Your bill should be simple to understand.  It should be predictable and not change from month to month.  And most importantly, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Or, even worse, there is no pricing.

One reason a tech company would make you inquire to discover the price of its software is that it knows a salesperson is more likely to get your credit card number than the product itself.  Another reason is to figure out how much money you can afford or are willing to pay so they can extract more money from you.  Throwing out a high list price (that isn’t actually listed anywhere public for fear of scaring people away), and playing the discount game to make you feel like you are getting a bargain is a common sales tactic with complicated software.

There’s a training program, and you probably have to pay for it.

You don’t train someone to use a simple product, you just use it.  Look at great technology companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber as a few of many examples where simpler solutions are less expensive…  The more complex and detailed software is, the more time you need to spend learning it, training your employees on it, and retraining your employees on it when there’s an update. Plus, there’s an increased likelihood of mistakes and complaints. You should get help when you need it, not need to get help just to be able to use a service because it is complicated.

Installation requires you to do 37 other things

A good solution doesn’t require multiple trips to electronic stores. A simple solution doesn’t keep telling you to download more programs to make it work correctly. A good, simple solution is the one that fixes your problem now, without a tacked-on to-do list.

Your customers need to download it, too, in order for you to use it.

Software shouldn’t just be easy foryou to use; it should also be a no-brainer for your clientele. When you add another barrier to use, whether it’s downloading an app or creating a unique login, you’re making customer service harder on yourself.  Everyone has a phone that receives text messages and calls.  They shouldn’t need to install an app.  And most won’t go through the extra effort so you are limiting the number of people than can receive better service with a simpler solution.

Figuring out which button does what feels like decoding your car’s dashboard icons.

When business is busy, you can’t afford to waste time fumbling with your software’s interface to access a certain feature. The line stretches out the door, the customers’ toes start to tap, and the person you’re trying to serve thinks you look like a doofus. And that is not how you want your next Yelp review to read. You should be able to know what every single button does instantly, not after countless seconds of deliberation.  And you shouldn’t have to navigate through all sorts of options and secondary information when greeting a customer.  Eyes on the customer, not the iPad.

Listen: We get it ‘cause we’ve been there.

That’s why we took simple and traditional tools —paper waitlists, reservation books, and grease-board floor plans—and transformed them into one intuitive app that you can download now and use now. Find it in the App Store and Google Play Store, or sign up at www.waitlist.me.