At the convenience store this morning there were six people at the counter and one cashier. The line bent around the corner and its tail dragged out the door. Someone up front muttered: would it kill them to open a second register.
At moments like that, queuing looks like pure inefficiency. Six people’s money has to be taken one at a time along a single line; five extra minutes, and nobody ends up with anything more. Counting only total time, those five minutes really are wasted.
But a queue doesn’t solve a problem of efficiency. It solves something harder: it turns “who got here first” into something visible. People cheat each other, especially when there are no witnesses. A line is a public ledger. Everyone can see how many heads are in front of them, and whether the person behind has crept forward. It isn’t clever, but it’s honest.
I’ve since come to think that the anger at queue-jumping doesn’t match the time lost. One person squeezing in ahead of you costs you a few dozen seconds. What actually gets offended is something else: the unwritten rule you had just been following is proven, on the spot, to be stupid. You obey because you assume everyone obeys; when someone doesn’t obey and goes unpunished, the minute you spent obeying becomes a joke. The real object of the anger isn’t the jumper — it’s the collapse of the rule. That’s why most people will let in the person who turns around and says, “Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” He has acknowledged the rule and merely asked for an exception. The one who slides in silently is the one people resent.
Following that thread, I’ve grown more lenient about paying for priority. Airport fast-track lanes, express tickets at tourist sites, priority reservations at restaurants — I don’t think these corrupt fairness. They write the difference down in plain figures, the rule is open to everyone, and anyone can work out what they’d have to pay. As long as the outcome is predictable, the line hasn’t collapsed. What actually stings is the other kind: an acquaintance gets waved through, internal numbers are quietly released, a window suddenly closes with no explanation. Privilege itself isn’t necessarily hateful. Privilege kept out of sight is.
There’s a further layer that rarely gets mentioned: modern life has hidden a great many queues. A ticket machine hands you a number; the waiting board says only “three tables ahead”; the résumés you send drop into a pool; the manuscript enters a review queue. These lines are invisible. You don’t know how many people are ahead of you, or whether someone has gone in through the side door. A visible queue annoys you; an invisible one makes you suspicious. Annoyance passes. Suspicion accumulates into grievance. That’s why places willing to lay their progress bare for you — the ticket machine calling numbers, the parcel tracker showing which depot it reached, the hospital screen scrolling through names — leave people far less hot under the collar, even when the wait is just as long. What they’re really selling is one thing: you can see where you stand.
Queuing has a by-product I never used to notice. While you stand there, strangers are very close, shoulders nearly touching, and nobody speaks. This is one of the few moments of coexistence in a city that requires no performance: you don’t have to smile, don’t have to introduce yourself, and nobody asks you to make room. Once a phone fills that blank space, all that’s left of the line is the waiting. I’m not going to pretend queuing is lovely; it does waste time. But those wasted minutes used to hold something else.
That day the line finally moved. I bought soy milk and two steamed buns, and the girl at the register looked up and said, “Sorry for the wait.” I said it was fine. Walking out, I thought that sentence matters: it acknowledges that your time was taken, and that you were holding up the order on everyone’s behalf. “Sorry for the wait” costs far less than a second register, and does far more.
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