I wouldn't call the manager lazy. It's more of lacking clear information that they need to make properly informed staffing decisions. I bet they have incentives tied to cost more than wait time. Instead of optimizing for cost and a gut feeling of need to meet a certain service threshold they can now use this data to predict capacity needs more accurately. Hopefully incentives are correctly set so they don't just ignore these new numbers.
My worst airline-related example of this involved a flight from Paris to Philadelphia. It was scheduled to arrive around 4PM. However, the departure was delayed about four hours because the plane was late getting in to Paris, which in turn happened because the plane had mechanical trouble in Philadelphia.
There were a lot of people on this flight who were connecting on to other cities. We landed just barely in time to catch the last flight of the day to many of those cities, but most people had to be rebooked since that wasn't their original flight.
So we get off the plane and about two hundred of us need to be rebooked, and we get to the counter to discover a grand total of three people working there. To process two hundred people. Who all needed fast service. For a problem that anyone could have seen coming literally a day in advance.
A lot of people unnecessarily spent their nights in hotels rather than with their families that night, because nobody looked at what was going on and said, we should bring in some more people for this.
But yes, I'm sure it's all about bad incentives. Whoever takes the hit for overtime staffing doesn't also take a hit for hotel vouchers, even though it probably would have been cheaper overall for the airline to staff up and get people on their flights. (Not to mention the benefit of pleasing your customers.)
