Originally Posted by
jackal
Don't know if that's nationwide policy or just how they do things here. Although it can make things annoyingly slow for the elite line, I guess it does seem fair (otherwise, a constant stream of elites would render the regular line completely immobile...).
Certainly won't happen at every single airport. At many of them (such as ORD) the elite and non-elite lines have physically separate exit points. They may feed into the same bank of machines, the number of which dedicated to each purpose varies with demand, but one agent can't possibly monitor both lines.