An r-gathering of customers C to facilities F is an assignment A of C to open facilities F' ⊂ F such that r (≥ 2) or more customers are assigned to each open facility. (Each facility needs enough number of customers for its opening.) Then the r-gathering problem finds an r-gathering minimizing a designated cost. Armon gave a simple 3-approximation algorithm for the r-gathering problem and proved that with assumption P ≠ NP the problem cannot be approximated within a factor of less than 3 for any r ≥ 3. The running time of the 3-approximation algorithm is O(|C||F|+r|C|+|C|log|C|)). In this paper we improve the running time of the algorithm by (1) removing the sort in the algorithm and (2) designing a simple but efficient data structure.