Wait watching: The winding history of queues

The British famously love them. Indians famously flout them. (“Ek… bas ek… minute… I am in a hurry” are words that never made anyone smile!)

You’ve been part of them: At hospitals and banks, where they’re usually orderly; at airports, where they’re surly and snaky; at coffee shops and theatres, where they’re accompanied by chatter, and aromas of roasted beans or popcorn.

They’re growing, right now, at major airports across the country. They’re a fixture near bus depots and railway stations in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad…

Some queues are so long, they’re iconic. More than 250,000 people lined up over five days to walk past the casket of Queen Elizabeth II, in 2022, with some waiting nearly 24 hours for their turn.

The queue for Wimbledon tickets, meanwhile, is a sub-tradition of the game, featuring tents, beer and fan banter. Although the tickets are sold online and through ballots, some are reserved for sale on site, on the day of play. Hundreds of thousands accordingly line up. In 2023, more than 532,651 stood, sat and lounged as they waited for about 24 hours for their turn at the ticket window.

An unofficial X handle, @TheWimbledonQ, offers updates such on ground capacity and things like where one might get free coffee. And Wimbledon has an official 31-page guide to queuing on its website. Avoid barbecues, camping stoves and fires, antisocial behaviour likely to cause annoyance, and loud music and ball games etc after 10 pm, it states.

Tell tail

Urban living, industrialisation and war are intimately tied to the evolution of the queue.

“It is difficult to tell how far back this behaviour goes, because it doesn’t really leave evidence behind. It is a low-intensity, ephemeral and fairly trivial feature of daily life, so traces of it don’t really end up in archives,” says social and cultural historian Joe Moran, who teaches at the Liverpool John Moores University and who has researched and written extensively on the subject, including in his book Queuing for Beginners (2007) and in the journal Modern British History.

The first recorded use of the word in English is rather recent. It can be found in the 1837 book The French Revolution, by the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. “If we look now at Paris, one thing is too evident: that the Bakers’ shops have got their Queues, or Tails; their long strings of purchasers, arranged in tail, so that the first come be the first served,” he wrote, describing conditions during the widespread famine that sparked the uprising.

Amid the industrial revolution, as cities became more densely populated and more of one’s life — from bread to banking — was outsourced, queuing became more widespread.

In Why Does the Other Line Always Move Faster? (2015), American linguist David Andrews writes of industrialising cities such as Paris and London: “Amid the buzz of industrial innovations and technological marvels (the lightbulb! the daguerreotype! the phonograph! flushable toilets!), a thoroughly modern problem presented itself: What do we do with all these freakin’ people?”

Queues became the answer to a need for heightened order amid scarcities of time, space and attention. The assembly line itself, and the workers manning it, were also, after all, a kind of queue. “They became a feature of organised, urbanised, industrialised society,” says Moran.

Between the lines

Along with the long lines came queuing furniture and etiquette. The former includes railings, barricades, channels and ropes — sometimes functional (at banks and airports), sometimes opulent (as at movie theatres).

In the digital age, queues have become fragmented and invisible, as automated token systems ensure that everyone knows where they stand, even if the line itself exists only in the abstract.

As for the etiquette of queuing, it is subtle and often intuitive, but holds immense potential. Friends can be made in such a line, or dire enemies. People have been known to fall in love, discover common relations, threaten a person’s entire family with annihilation.

Each urban culture has its own line etiquette too.

In the UK, for instance, even the risk of missing one’s flight may not be considered reason enough to jump ahead. It is said to be the widespread public opinion that if one did not manage one’s own time well enough, one does not deserve to leapfrog over those who did.

In India, at the other end of this spectrum, almost anything can be viewed as reason to skip ahead, if one asks nicely. People with children, old people, people who say they are ill, or simply state that they are late, have a fair chance of being waved forward with a quiet nod. Jut into a queue without explanation, though, and it takes just one quiet voice to start a revolution.

Queue tips

Interestingly, research has found that a single queue, even if it is serpentine, is often perceived as less stressful than multiple parallel ones, because it eliminates the element of choice (and subsequent regret) and is seen to hold the promise of greater fairness.

Any queue that indicates wait time, even if that wait time is long, alleviates stress too, researchers from BI Norwegian Business School and University of Bath found, in a 2020 paper published in the journal Psychology.

“The London underground and buses have realised this,” the report states. “The “guestimations” need not be accurate… Information takes away the ambiguity and gives a person the confidence that the system is still running.”

The space between two people in a line matters too, the researchers found. The smaller the gap, or the more crowded the room, the higher the chances of frustration and annoyance.

The chances of conflagration rise further when one adds “invader children”, who zoom in and out of queues, to the mix. Unless those children are below the age of five, in which case they may receive a positive reaction, the research found.

Any acknowledgement of the wait, including light compensation such as a snack, a drink or a discount voucher, meanwhile, can turn complainers into happier campers.

“We are collective beings,” as Moran puts it. “We like doing things together. Queues are situations where weak social ties are forged. There’s value in that intimacy.”