Acoustic comfort for hypermarket cashiers: Problems and solutions

Abstract

An acoustic investigation carried out in a large hypermarket pointed out that several acoustic “zones” could be identified. Among them, the most critical was the checkout area, where cashiers were exposed to many noise sources like customers passing with shopping trolleys, “beeps” due to barcode readers, people voices, packaging and paging messages, and, above all, background music. In fact, as the checkout position usually divides the hypermarket from the shopping arcade, workers in this area are further exposed to music (and noise) from the nearby cafes, restaurants, and stores. As a result background noise LA90 is about 66 dB, with peaks (LA10) of about 72 dB. Subjective analysis also reported the highest rate of complaints in this area. Starting from a detailed analysis of the different noise sources and of the room acoustic conditions of the area (including reverberation time and speech transmission index measurements), a set of mitigation actions is analyzed and discussed.