Area Man's 11-Year Spreadsheet Tracking Grocery Store Checkout Lines Called 'The Most Important Document In This House' By Increasingly Concerned Wife

PEORIA HEIGHTS, IL — Local resident Gary Tillman, 52, has spent the past eleven years timing every checkout line he has ever stood in at the Kroger on Prospect Road, logging each result in a spreadsheet he refers to only as "The Ledger," sources close to the family confirmed Monday.

The document, now in its fourth workbook after the first three "maxed out," tracks cashier speed, cart volume, bagger competence, and what Tillman calls "the coupon variable" — a column reserved for shoppers who dig through a purse for ten minutes after the total has already printed. He checks it before entering the store the way other people check the weather.

"I don't time it every visit," Tillman said, adjusting a laminated printout of lane 4's rolling average. "Just the ones that count." Asked which ones count, he said all of them count, then excused himself to update a formula.

His wife, Diane Tillman, said the spreadsheet has quietly become the household's most consulted document, outranking the mortgage paperwork and the kids' vaccination records combined. "He asked me once if I wanted to see 'the Tuesday afternoon lane 6 anomaly,'" she said. "I said no. He showed me anyway. It took forty minutes and there were three follow-up questions I did not ask."

Dr. Elaine Vosk, a statistics professor at a nearby community college who reviewed the file at Tillman's request, called it "genuinely one of the more rigorous datasets I have encountered outside of peer review," before adding that she had blocked his number the following week.

The Ledger's predictive model, which Tillman built in a spare bedroom he now calls "the office," currently boasts 89 percent accuracy in forecasting which of the store's six lanes will move fastest between 4 and 6 p.m. on weekdays. He has offered to share the model publicly. The store manager has asked him twice not to.

Neighbor Phil Kowalczyk said he began quietly opening a second, competing spreadsheet after Tillman corrected his line choice at the store three separate times. "I'm not trying to beat him," Kowalczyk said, opening a laptop that was already timing him. "I just think lane 2 deserves a fair hearing."

Tillman said he has no plans to stop the project, citing an unfinished hypothesis involving self-checkout kiosks and a shopper's likelihood of scanning a bag of onions as a bag of potatoes. At press time, he was recalibrating the model for the Thanksgiving surge, a season he refers to, without irony, as "the playoffs."