Huh, really? I wonder if that’s an airport-by-airport variation, or if things have changed. Last time I did that was a few years ago, when the PreCheck line was really long at one checkpoint while the regular one was almost empty. I went through the regular one and nobody asked me anything. I did have to take off my shoes and take my laptop out and such (this was a few years back), but it still ended up being quite a bit faster than PreCheck.
Regardless, those incidents are the exceptions… 90%+ of the time, the PreCheck and Global Entry queues have been quicker. Even if they look the same length, they tend to move faster.
For any of us, we only wait in one of the two lines on any given occasion. So it’s easy to misestimate how long in time the other line really would have been.
Might have just been that agent. There was no one in either line. There have been other times when I’ve go through the normal line, I think it was Huston when after immigration there were no signs for precheck and I just went to the normal TSA line.
Before I submitted my last post, I checked my Verizon bill for my trip last summer. On the days when I crossed the border between two countries I was only charged $12 for that day, not $24. That’s my experience with the Verizon travel pass. If you had a different experience, you should take it up with Verizon because it’s not supposed to be the way you describe.