I waited 45 minutes to buy a single croissant in Fitzroy. Why do humans queue?
I have waited in line for a Lune croissant. At the worst possible time, too – mid-morning on a Sunday, the queue stretching out the door of the vaunted bakery’s Fitzroy warehouse and curling around the corner. This is an embarrassing admission for someone wary of falling for hype.
The line, which on countless other occasions I have smugly strode past, took 45 minutes from joining to counter. With friends from out of town, I joined grumpily, unconvinced that the pastries – expensive, if delicious – would be worth the wait. At the end of the line, with nary a sheet of laminated dough in sight, for a moment it didn’t seem too late to leave. But soon we were hemmed in from behind by groups of tourists, parents with fidgety children, bored couples thumbing their phones. In Sydney this week, people queued for hours, from before first light, to be at the top of the queue when Lune opened its new flagship store. Unlike those poor sods who waited in the rain, we baked under full summer sun. All of us waiting, squinting and sweaty, for a supposedly better version of something we could get nearly anywhere else.
What draws us to or makes us abandon a queue? And why is it that some among us happily join them while others are constitutionally inclined to avoid lines at all costs?
A matter of time
“Of course people don’t like waiting. There’s an opportunity cost of time; there’s a psychological cost,” says Sezer Ulku, a professor of operations and information management at Georgetown University, who has conducted several studies on queueing. Choosing to join a queue is to make a decision about how to allocate the scarce resource of one’s time. “In the end, if you value the product more than the wait, you end up spending [the] time.”
In some countries, queues are what Ulku describes wryly as “teardrop-shaped: everybody is at the front”. But in many countries – particularly in the Anglosphere – queues are bound by social norms and tend to operate on the first in, first out principle: that you’ll be served after someone who has been waiting for longer. Cutting in line violates people’s sense of fairness – perhaps why the term queue-jumping has been effectively weaponised against asylum seekers.
Long lines have historically had negative associations, viewed as being a deterrent to customers and associated with dissatisfaction. In postwar Britain, anthropologists have pointed out, queueing became a source of national resentment, with recurrent lines at banks and post offices seen as emblematic of inefficiency.
But what people are lining up for makes a difference: if the goal at the end is pleasurable (pastries, a new iPhone, a theme park ride), a lengthy queue is viewed as more favourable than when the task at hand is merely practical (applying for a driver’s licence, exiting a highway, going through a security check).
Queueing almost becomes an end in itself, with its own intrinsic rewards and satisfaction
Prof Leon Mann
Long queues can also act as a way of signalling quality for existing or potential customers – a form of proof that something is so desired that others willingly give up their time for it. Ulku uses the example of deciding to choose between restaurants in an unfamiliar city. “Some have a long line, some have a short line. Even though you don’t want to wait, at the same time you don’t know where to go – you may prefer the restaurant with a long line.”
The longer someone spends in line, the less likely they are to abandon the queue – known as reneging in queueing theory – because of the sunk cost of waiting.
Objectively, the number of people behind you in a queue makes no difference to the amount of time it takes for you to be served – but we don’t always make rational decisions. People are far less likely to abandon a queue if there are more people waiting behind them. One study found that people in last place in a queue were more than twice as likely to abandon the queue than someone in the penultimate position – an effect partly attributed to not being able to compare oneself with someone worse off.
We are also notoriously bad timekeepers: research consistently finds that consumers significantly overestimate the amount of time spent waiting. Waits seem subjectively longer when we’re solo, unoccupied or when the cause is unanticipated or unexplained, such as an out-of-sight car accident resulting in a line of traffic.
‘Emotional components drive our decisions’
While waiting in line at a cupcake shop, Ulku came up with an idea for a queue study. His subsequent research found that the amount of time people spend queueing to purchase items increases the amount they buy, as a means to “offset the long wait suffered”. “After a long wait, you don’t just want to buy one.”
Long queues can lead to antagonism towards service staff, and even physical aggression. To prevent clientele from becoming too grumpy, businesses design queues to keep people moving and occupied.
“Stores are very calculated,” says Narayanan Janakiraman, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Arlington, citing the careful placement of impulse products like magazines and chocolates near checkout counters. Snaking lines not only fit more people into small areas but also dissimulate the length of the queue.
The same rationale explains mirrors in elevators and magazines in medical waiting rooms. “To the extent that you are distracted … you don’t feel the time passing,” Ulku says.
A single queue leading to multiple service points tends to work better than multiple queues, which can make people impatient. As the number of queues increases, the rate of people abandoning their own line also increases, Janakiraman says.
Rationally, you wouldn’t switch to another queue if it meant that it took longer for you to be served. In reality, this often happens, because people are bad at estimating progress.
Related: I like to complain about queues – but I secretly love the ritual and excitement | Gary Nunn
Janakiraman’s research into phone queues for an emergency number in Hyderabad has shown that some people prematurely hang up and dial back again out of impatience – incurring potentially life-threatening delays in the process. “When we’re forced to endure aversive experiences … oftentimes emotional components drive our decisions,” he says.
Sometimes, queueing becomes an act of ceremony, as in the case of the queue to see Queen Elizabeth lying in state. Academics have suggested that queueing is a notoriously English preoccupation because it appeals to an “obsession with order, hierarchy, and one’s place within it” – perhaps why cutting in line is seen as so objectionable.
In the 1960s, when thousands lined up outside the MCG to queue for AFL grand final tickets, attempts to jump the queue resulted in brawls and hospitalisations.
Prof Leon Mann, a psychologist then at Harvard who studied the MCG queues and wrote about them in a 1969 paper, noted that “to be able to claim, in football-mad Melbourne, that one has stood through the night and obtained tickets earns the kind of kudos and respect that must have been given to those who fought at Agincourt”.
In that instance, he noted, queueing “almost becomes an end in itself, with its own intrinsic rewards and satisfaction”.
But for the impatient among us, queueing can feel like torturous limbo. Some might argue that no pastry – no matter how flaky – is worth waiting more than a few minutes for. I am one of them.
