Question: The College Bookstore has just hired a new manager, one with a business background. Claudia Mark man has been charged with increasing the profitability of the bookstore, with the profits going to the general scholarship fund. Claudia started her job just before the beginning of the semester and was analyzing the sales during the days when students are buying their textbooks. The store has four checkout stands, and Claudia noticed registers three and four served fewer students than registers one and two. She is not sure whether the layout of the store channels customers into these registers, whether the checkout clerks in these lines are simply slower than the other two, or whether she was just seeing random differences. Claudia kept a record of which stands the next 1,000 students chose for checkout. The students checked out of the four stands according to the following pattern:

Stand 1      Stand 2       Stand 3        Stand 4

   338           275            201              186

a. Based on these data, can Claudia conclude the proportion of students using the four checkout stands is equal? 1Use an α = 0.05.

b. A friend suggested that you could just as well conduct four hypothesis tests that the proportion of customers visiting each stand is equal to p = 0.25. Discuss the merits of this suggestion.