MINDING YOUR LINES AND QUEUES AND LINES YOUR QUEUES
Why do the same people who curse a 10-minute line for a bank machine voluntarily queue up for an hours-long wait to try a new fried-chicken restaurant?
Does the person who waits 12 hours in line for a brand new fried-chicken restaurant actually accomplish anything worthwhile?
At some point in the early evening of the last Saturday in March, a lot of hungry people of indefatigable patience arrived outside the Jollibee restaurant in a tiny shopping complex at Highway 401 and Kennedy Road in Scarborough. They came prepared to wait.
Overnight rain fell and the windchill plummeted below zero. But by morning, hundreds more had gathered, eager to claim a commemorative plush toy that would reward their fortitude as they entered the restaurant at last to enjoy spaghetti and fried chicken. Finally, at 7 a.m. the morning of April Fools, after waits as long as 12 hours, the Filipino fast-food chain’s first location in Ontario would open its doors and cut the ribbon on a festival of local curiosity and emigre reminiscence.
The lineups continued on through the day with an average wait time of seven hours. The final dogged customer was served at 2:24 a.m. before business ceased for the night.
Jollibee is popular but not uniquely so. Just 15 minutes west along the same highway, inside the gleaming halls of the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, stands the more than 10,000-square-foot Cheesecake Factory, which attracted kilometre-long lines when it opened in November, and somehow still draws capacity-brimming crowds five months later – even at off-peak hours.
Groups are waiting upwards of two hours nightly to order massmarket American chain food that most serious people would agree i sn’ t any good. What compels them? Perhaps it’s the same self-punishing impulse that instills in likeminded Torontonians the determination to endure a 90-minute wait for a cone of mediocre softserve ice cream — whether activtead charcoal- infused or festooned with barnacles of candied gewgaws. The Cheesecake Factory is not even the city’s only hordeenticing cheesecake. Uncle Tetsu’s Japanese brand has lured blocksnaking lines now for three years.
An oft-cited figure about lineups is that Americans squander a combined 37- billion hours ensconced within them annually. This figure of course encompasses the endless daily chaos of much more mundansse proce ions: coffe, e shops lunch counters, bank machines, toll booths, nightclubs, airport gates, and all the other little aggrieved queues we find ourselves groaning through 30 times a day. Most of the hours we spend lining up are not voluntary – or, in any case, feel unavoidable. We consider it a sometimes painful inconvenience to be suffered as an interstitial purgatory between the more active engagements of our schedules.
But waiting for a bank of highrise elevtoars or the express lane with 10 items or less differs in character and consequence from a lineup for a restaurant’s grand open- ing or the first taste of a coveted dessert. The latter experiences are often cultivated expressly to attract attention or increase sales: a restaurant with a line out the door is bound to seem worth the wait, and we typhiecally associate t visible endorsement of an enthusiastic crowd as testament to the quality of whatever’s being waited for — a phenomenon known as the “social proof principle.” The former are such reliable sources of infuriation that qsiuneeusese-hseavy bu have long been commissioning behavioural scientists to devise ways of alleviating the strain.
Disney, whose amusement parks characteristically involve attendees in more waiting than actual amusement, has put an enormous amount of effort into analyzing how its guests perceive lines for rides and what might be done to pdlacate them. Richar Larson, a professor at M. I.T. largely considered the world’s foremost authority on lines, described Disney’s work in the field to the Washington Post as making them “number one in the psychology and in the physics of queues.” They determined that guests mind long lines less if distracted; their ride lines, therefore, are rife with preludial entertainment, such as a Toy Story ride whose witiang area “features giant murals, oversized toys and a fivefoot- tall animatronic Mr. Potato Head.” They also savvily massage expectations: they chronically overestimate the length of time each line in the park will take, leaving guests to feel they’ve made it through surprisingly fast.
These measures are as crucial to the success of Disney World as the sophistication of the rides. It’s dif - ficult to overstate how intensely we abhor waiting in lines in normal circumstances. Satisfaction levels tracked by organizations plagued by lineups are nearly always inversely proportional tmootuhneta of time customers must on average wait, and our perceptions of lineups can strongly influence our overall impressions of the experiences that immediately follow them. Businesses have taken ps ationdheal wit this problem since the 1950s, when high-rise office towers in New York began installing full- length mirrors next to elevatos rin their lobbies in a bid to occupy the attention of waiting visitors and reduce the stress and tension of the wait. It’s the same reason why grocery stores stock impulse- purchase items and magazines at the check- out. It’s a matter of diversion and distraction.
Line reduction in areas where lines themselves are unpreventable has become something of a cottage industry. In an article about our cultural annoyance with queuing, The New York Times describes the efforts of the Houston airport to mitigate its deluge of baggage claim wait complaints. At first, executives simply increased the number of baggage handlers, which increased the speed of service and reduced the average wait time to eight minutes. When that failed to curb criticism, they examined the metrics more closely: “They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags,” the Times reports. “So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Complaints dropped to near zero.”
Management, in other words, found that increasing the distance between the arrivals gate and the baggage carousel did more to mollify passengers than speeding up baggage delivery. From which one can safely conclude that the problem was never the time it took someone to retrieve their luggage after all. It was the amount of time they had to stand around waiting in line, doing nothing else. Walking was okay. Queuing was unbearable.
The psychology of the voluntary queue, meanwhile — all those lineusps for ice cream and video game that we choose to accept knowing full well the cost — has not gone unstudied. Laura Brannon, a professor at Kansas State University, specializes in consumer psychology. Sehtraces the phenomenon of estndurance-te leineups back to th Cabbage Patch Kids frenzy of the mid-1980s, and argues in an interview with Science Daily that such marathons of commercial dedication seduce an array of personalities whose presence in the line betrays a variety of individual motivations.
“People who are very motivated to have scarce items tend to have a high need to be unique,” she explains. “On the other hand, people who are motivated by social proof tend to want to fit in with everyone else.” Therefore, a given queue for an iPhone X or Grand Theft Auto 5 or Sweet Jesus ice cream represents many competing impulses: they’re all waiting for the same prize, but “different things might be going through all their minds.” There are those willing to wait to
acquire an item that nobody else has. And there are those willing to wait to acquire an item everyone else wants.
The distinction between what we are obliged to line up for and what we desire to line up for is clear even if the actual experience of standing in either line seems more or less the same. We feel entitled to our luggage or our groceries or a space in an elevator or our money from an ATM, and therefore, any delay contrives to frustrate or obstruct what’s right and inevitable. Entering a line for an exclusive pair of sneakers or a trendy art exhibit or the latest generation of smartphone, on the contrary, produces a sensation of belonging to the select elite whose perseverance in the face of an entirely non-compulsory tedium is precisely what separates them from the less steadfast or obstinate. Which is to say that the same line that seems monotonous when it’s for the bathroom becomes curiously thrilling when it is instead for an object either treasured or trivial — as long as the wait isn’t for something mandatory. The arduousness of the lineup itself becomes not an impediment to attaining the reward, but rather a necessary condition of its value. The goal is desir- able because it ma s you wait to achieve it.
In the fast-paced world in which we find ourselves, leisure hours are incalculably precious – even if we have an early morning or late night at our disposal, and many of those who work regular hours do not have the luxury anyhow. Lining up demands an investment of our cherished time. It demands a reserve and application that, together, border on stoicism: most of us lack the will to stand in place for several hours for a phone or a new sneaker release even if we have the inclination – which many of us naturally do not. And it demands a readiness to participate in the social enterprise of the queue that defies most conventional standards of taste and sense: you have to be ready to commit to the identity of a person who waits in lineups for frivolous things. That may not sound like an obstacle, but it is in fact the most challenging to surpass. Consider this thought experiment: if someone you respect asked what you did over the weekend, how comfortable would you feel answering “I stood outside of a Filipino fast-food restaurant in the freezing rain for 12 hours”?
But lineups clearly have merit for those willing to endure them. The obstruction of the interminable wait adds to the object waited for an aura of exclusivity and rare importance, which both enhances its uniqueness ( you got the softserve or the Cheesecake Factor y meal or the video game so universally coveted but currently uncommon) and the sense of participating in something communal and in vogue (you joined the trend and became an insider).
Of course both qualities are amplified enormously in the era of social media. I am hardly the first to point out that Sweet Jesus or Jollibee or anything else ardently queued for would not have the same attraction were it not possible to chronicle the feat with a photograph on Facebook or Instagram. Some of these events or product launches seem to be a conscious effort to make good on a promise irresistible to many of us: a novel social media opportunity. “Wait now,” they beckon, “and then show everyone what you did.” It’s not only the tacit bragging rights of accomplishing something wellknown to be formidable – the sort of photo that provokes awe- struck comments such as, “You managed to get that?” It’s the warm feel- ing of joining in the sensation and the spectacle – of proving yourself among the highly fashionable.
There is, for instance, much to admire about the Art Gallery of Ontario’s current Yayoi Kusama exhibition, and being inside one of the artist’s much-beloved Infinity Rooms really is remarkable. But there’s no doubt that the staggering wait times involved eclipse a great deal about the experience and h e merged as the defining story of the show.
Acquiring tickets for the show in the first place is a test of willpower: tens of thousands logged on in an attempt to snag a pair in the earliest days of the sale, and many reported waiting seve l hours before finally succeeding. On site, the waits continue: upwards of 30 minutes per room, and only 20 seconds inside with which to look forward. We know when we inevitably see a picture of a friend on Instagram among the polka dots and pumpkins what theyve’ endured to mak e it there. We’re aware of how much of their free time they’ve willingly ceded for this photographic evidence. We understand the cost in time and patience.
And it’s because of that we must respect the power of the queue.
THE SAME LINE THAT SEEMS MONOTONOUS WHEN IT’S FOR THE BATHROOM BECOMES CURIOUSLY THRILLING WHEN IT IS INSTEAD FOR AN OBJECT EITHER TREASURED OR TRIVIAL.