Question

Costco is opening up a new gas station. They expect to serve 147 customers per hour from their 14 gas pumps. Each customer is expected to spend four minutes at the pump filling their gas tank. However, the county only approved them for 10 gas pumps. Do they have enough to serve the expected demand in customers? How many customers maximum can they serve now?

Please solve using customers per hour / throughput per hour = # of machines

Answer 1

Costco has enough gas pumps to serve the expected customer demand.

Step-by-step explanation:

To determine if Costco has enough gas pumps to serve the expected demand in customers, we need to find the maximum number of customers they can serve with the approved 10 gas pumps.

Since each customer spends 4 minutes at the pump, it means that each pump can serve 60/4=15 customers per hour.

Therefore, with 10 pumps, Costco can serve a maximum of 10*15=150 customers per hour. This is greater than the expected demand of 147 customers per hour, so they do have enough gas pumps to serve the expected customer demand.