Assume you have a business with ten employees, and you want to choose a time slot to give a lunch break to them. You have four different time slots as candidates, and you want to choose the one in which the chances of having customers are lower. How would you use the knowledge from this unit to make this decision? Which probability distribution do you use? What data do you need to collect?

Response :

As the owner of the business, I will use the Poisson distribution to measure the probability of the expectation of a random variable. In this case, the scheduling of employee breaks is expected to happen in four different time slots. Assuming the breaks are for a half-hour period for the ten employees for each time slot. Therefore, the data to be collected to determine the probability of the business having fewer customers may consider the following.

1. The average number of customers per hour, for example during business hours of 9 am - 5:30 pm
2. Consideration for average time spent by each customer in the store
3. The peak period when the business has the highest number of customers in-store

Therefore, considering the expectation of these random variables will help to obtain a measure of a probability distribution to schedule employee breaks without disrupting the quality of service to customers.

Reference

Holmes, A., Illowsky, B., & Dean, S. (2018).Poisson Distribution. OpenStax College, Rice University. Retrieved fromhttps://opentextbc.ca/introbusinessstatopenstax/chapter/poisson-distribution/

Question :

I wonder if this works and can realistically be applied in all types of stores? because based on what type of business it might differ quite a bit. A restaurant vs retail store vs an office. What do you think?