one of the challenges of services is that they cannot normally be stored for later use. A hairstylist cannot prepackage a haircut for the following day: it must be done in real time. In an ideal world, nobody would ever have to wait to conduct a service transaction. However, firm cannot afford to provide extensive extra capacity that would go unutilized most of time. As we have seen , there are a variety of procedures for bringing demand and supply into balance. But what's a manager to do when the possibilities for shaping demand and adjusting capacity have been exhausted and yet supply and demand are still out of balance? Not taking any action and leaving customers to sort things out is no recipe for customer satisfaction. Rather than allowing matters to degenerate into a random free-for-all , customer oriented firms try to develop strategies for ensuring order, predictability, and fairness. In business in which demand regularly exceeds supply, managers often can take steps to inventory demand. This task can be achieved in one of two ways
1. by asking customer to wait in line-usually on first-come, first-serve basis- or by offering customers more advanced queuing
2. by offering customers the opportunity of reserving or booking space in advance.
we will discuss the wait line and queuing system in this section and reservation systems int he next.