Google to show wait times at grocery stores

Google is working a new feature for its Search that shows estimated wait times at restaurants and grocery stores.

"Rolling out soon, wait times on Google Search (and coming soon to Maps) shows you the estimated wait at your favorite restaurants. Now you can decide whether that cronut is really worth an hour wait or plan ahead to get your fix at a time when you can avoid a wait entirely," writes Quang Duong, a Google engineer, on the company's news page. ""To see wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins, just search for the business on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the Popular Times section. There you’ll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. And by tapping on any of the hour bars, you’ll see the estimated wait for that time period. You can even scroll left and right to see a summary of each day’s wait times below the hour bars–so you can plan ahead to beat the crowds."

Wait time estimates are based on anonymized historical data, similar to how Google computes the previously launched Popular Times and Visit Duration features.

While the restaurant feature has already rolled out, Google says the feature will expand to cover grocery stores when it hits Google Maps late this month.

Read more about the new Google feature by clicking here.