Sep 15, 2026 · 21 min · 10 segments
Keith Carpentier is the CEO and founder of QBuster, the queue management platform now operating in over 10,000 retail locations — including TJ Maxx, Disney, TSA, Cinemark, and a fast-growing roster of…
Arthur ZaczkiewiczHostSo as retailers face increasing pressure to modernize, how do you balance the need for like physical hardware with technology? Everything is AI now with AI-driven invisible queue management.
Retailers work very hard to stay at the forefront, but given the reality of legacy real estate and architecture and infrastructure, it's difficult at scale for brick-and-mortar retailers to you know, to to outrun reality, physical reality.
And and in a way, that's part of what we see our mission is, is to help physical retail because they're not they are, excuse me, burdened and limited in a physical way that the e-commerce boys aren't.
And so we sort of take that as a bit of our our mission, where how can we help, you know, level the playing field a little bit or give them an advantage? One of the one of the the facets that I'm most proud of.
As of this year, we crossed a threshold where we are now serving and managing over 1 billion customer transactions a year, it's managed through a QBuster system, which is pretty spectacular.
And the team and I had done a little bit of a deep dive and like, okay, I mean, that's a wonderful statistic, very proud, but what does that really mean? I know what that means for the retailer, but really the hidden beneficiary is the customer, is the consumer, right? So if you do the math, of, you know, a billion customer transactions a year.
That math scales out to half a million hours a year we're giving back to customers.
So, I mean, I think about my own experience and the shopping journey ends right when you leave the store.
But what is that? What do shoppers expect when they're queuing up? What do they expect? What kind of experience do you think they really want?
I think, well, I know part of our ethos or one of our mantras is the notion that satisfaction of a guest really is the experience minus the perception.
And those are two very, very critical details, right? The operations teams, they love to measure things and they love to dig into reality, right? And then the customer experience teams are really focused on perception, which is a little harder to measure.
So what do customers want? They want a fair line or queue, right? They want it to be efficient.
They want it to be equitable, meaning somebody who came maybe later isn't being served before me, right? They want to know that they're moving forward.
One of the principles of waiting that we often reference is, you know, an occupied wait is just feels shorter than an unoccupied weight.
And there's levers that we pull within that ethos, that principle that helps retailers, frankly, and customers just have a better experience in the end.
So as retailers face increasing pressure to modernize, how do you balance the need for like physical hardware with technology? Everything is AI now with AI-driven invisible queue management.
Retailers work very hard to stay at the forefront, but given the reality of legacy real estate and architecture and infrastructure, it's difficult at scale for brick-and-mortar retailers to you know, to to outrun reality, physical reality.
And and in a way, that's part of what we see our mission is, is to help physical retail because they're not they are, excuse me, burdened and limited in a physical way that the e-commerce boys aren't.
And so we sort of take that as a bit of our our mission, where how can we help, you know, level the playing field a little bit or give them an advantage? One of the one of the the facets that I'm most proud of.
As of this year, we crossed a threshold where we are now serving and managing over 1 billion customer transactions a year, it's managed through a QBuster system, which is pretty spectacular.
And the team and I had done a little bit of a deep dive and like, okay, I mean, that's a wonderful statistic, very proud, but what does that really mean? I know what that means for the retailer, but really the hidden beneficiary is the customer, is the consumer, right? So if you do the math, of, you know, a billion customer transactions a year.
That math scales out to half a million hours a year we're giving back to customers.
So, I mean, I think about my own experience and the shopping journey ends right when you leave the store.
But what is that? What do shoppers expect when they're queuing up? What do they expect? What kind of experience do you think they really want?
I think, well, I know part of our ethos or one of our mantras is the notion that satisfaction of a guest really is the experience minus the perception.
And those are two very, very critical details, right? The operations teams, they love to measure things and they love to dig into reality, right? And then the customer experience teams are really focused on perception, which is a little harder to measure.
So what do customers want? They want a fair line or queue, right? They want it to be efficient.
They want it to be equitable, meaning somebody who came maybe later isn't being served before me, right? They want to know that they're moving forward.
One of the principles of waiting that we often reference is, you know, an occupied wait is just feels shorter than an unoccupied weight.
And there's levers that we pull within that ethos, that principle that helps retailers, frankly, and customers just have a better experience in the end.
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