Forty minutes of rain and the line outside the coffee cart collapsed. Do I throw the session out or is that a result?
FieldworkAnswered356 views
Thursday session at the coffee cart. Started dry with eleven people in line.
It started raining properly about fifteen minutes in. Within five minutes the line was three people and stayed there. Arrivals did not stop, people looked at the line and kept walking.
So my arrival rate for that window is not the demand, it is the demand minus everybody who decided it was not worth standing in the wet.
Is that session ruined, or is it the most interesting forty minutes I have recorded?
Marked as the answer
Keep it and label it. A queue with nowhere to shelter is a queue that charges rent in weather, and you have just measured the rent. Write the conditions at the top of every sheet from now on, because you will want to sort by them in week 9 and you cannot reconstruct the weather afterwards.
Started writing the temperature down after reading this. Already looks like it matters more than the time of day at my site.