There are expensive retail consultants who clean up stores and improve sales by doing this.
Gap gets this right. Gap stores have big, clear counters, so you can bring up lots of merchandise and have a place to put it. This increases sales per customer. Gap is amazingly successful despite a rather blah product line.
Ironically, I think "open" stores (like an Apple store) exhibit the same behavior. Even though there's technically no labyrinth to navigate through, good luck finding an efficient way to purchase a product, especially if it's just a small one. You first signal an Apple checkout fairy to grace you with her checkout wand, so that someone else can find you and swipe your card. If your purchase is small, they hardly even give you time of day. So stupid.
And the analogy can be extended to online stores too. Any store with a "just add this too" in the checkout experience invokes the same negative reaction. Though I am a heavy Amazon customer, their checkout process is just barely tolerable in this way. And think about GoDaddy and how miserably awful their checkout experience has been (and continues to be) throughout the years.
But for every person like you, there are about 50 others who do browse through all the stuff and perhaps add more to their shopping. Not everyone is in a hurry and capitalizing on small additions and combo deals and sales signups can be great business for the retailer.
I did consulting for them and they hired aforementioned retail consultants for this job. I will admit I initially thought it was stupid, having been a wise retail manager at the age of 17 at one point in my life (and did a lot of level-1 tracking of sales and A/B testing, even back then!). But when these retail consultants showed me their data and how it was formatted... it was unbelievable. Most of what I experienced in retail were these nebulous and stupid ideas that were conjured from the ether from my direct managers and general managers and the like. While I'm sure not all the information I saw trickled down to employees, it was truly enlightening and gave me zero room to argue particulars with how they were studying and implementing retail flow, checkout, and return procedures.
Japanese convenience stores also get this right most of the time. There is almost never a line up at the cash register. As soon as one begins to form, the employees will drop whatever they are doing and open up a new register. At some places, the register can actually handle more than one customer at a time, so if you have someone fumbling for change, they can start tallying up goods for the next person in line.
Possibly I'm not typical, but I often spend a lot of time browsing in stores. As soon as I have decided that I'm done, though, I get very irritated at anything that slows me down. I had never really put my finger on it until reading the OP's post.
Retailers no longer have the power to make customers wait. Consumers have too many other buying options.
Also, box office revenue hasn't collapsed or anything, so I'm not sure what you mean with your example. In fact, come to think of it, I see people lining up for things multiple times every year at the theaters I frequent.
And yet Apple had a line 12+ hours before opening to release their 9th generation iPhone -- despite also taking orders online.
Hopdoddy in Austin has a line out the door for lunch and dinner; they even have a person dedicated to managing it, along with waitstaff to take drink orders
I think the line is alive and well in America for certain establishments.