Minding your lines and queues

Does the person who waits 12 hours in line for a brand new fried-chicken restaurant actually accomplish anything worthwhile?

DOES THE PERSON WHO WAITS 12 HOURS

IN LINE FOR A NEW RESTAURANT 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 isn’t any good. What compels them? Perhaps it’s the same selfpunishing impulse that instills in likeminded Torontonians the determination to endure a 90-minute wait for a cone of mediocre softserve ice cream — whether activated 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 mundane processions: coffee 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 elevators or the express lane with 10 items or less differs in character and consequence from a lineup for a restaurant’s grand opening 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 typically associate the 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 queue-heavy businesses 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 placate them. Richard 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 waiting 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 difficult 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 to the amount 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 pains to deal with this problem since the 1950s, when high-rise office towers in New York began installing full-length mirrors next to elevators in 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 lineups for ice cream and video games 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. She traces the phenomenon of endurance-test lineups back to the 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