Social queues

It is Friday and that means it is time for the lighter side of economics and finance. But Friday’s also mean that the weekend is coming and in the time of lockdowns, this means getting into long queues in front of shops to wait for your turn to buy groceries. 

Here in the UK, queuing has been a national pastime even before the lockdown. If there is no queue when a customer arrives, one has to make sure to form an orderly queue of one. But I am German, and I am not used to queuing because, well, in Germany people are efficient. So, when I was queuing last weekend, I was wondering about several things.

First, why is it that even though many people are furloughed or working from home, they still shop for food on the weekends instead of during the week? If we would all shop for food randomly, queues would be minimal, but because more people shop on a Saturday, queues are short during the week and longer on Saturdays. Why do we not adjust our habits?

Second, what makes the wait in a queue shorter, and what do we know about queues?

I don’t know the answer to the first question, but I have found out a lot about the second question while queuing for food this week. And queues turn out to be fascinating things.

Queues are spontaneous social systems that have clear rules. In finance parlance, they are a FIFO system, where the first person to enter the queue is the first person to be served. If you try to disrupt this FIFO system, you better be prepared to get a lot of grief from other people waiting in the queue (of course, Brits being polite this is expressed as mere tuttering). The always entertaining Stanley Milgram performed an experiment in 1986 where he asked lab assistants to approach 129 queues in New York City and jump the queue between the third and fourth person in line. As you might imagine the person in front of the intruder didn’t mind much, while the person just behind the intruder protested the norm violation loudly. The more assistants tried to push into the queue the more likely the protestations became. But here is the funny thing. If the intruder had a passive observer with him who stood next to the queue without trying to jump the queue, protestations became much less likely. One assumes that this is so because the passive observer “validates” the actions of the intruder – or simply because people in the queue fear they might get beaten up by the intruder and his friend if they protest too much.

However, there is an even simpler way to jump a queue without being socially ostracised. Give a reason why you have to jump the queue – even if it is a nonsensical reason. In 1978, Ellen Langer and her colleagues asked assistants to jump a queue for a copying machine in a university. The trick was that these intruders either gave no reason (“Excuse me, I have to copy 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine?”), a sensible reason (“Excuse me, I have to copy 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine because I am in a rush?”) and a nonsensical reason (“Excuse me, I have to copy 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine because I have to make copies?”). If no reason was given, 60% of students did the intruder a small favour and let him jump the queue. If the intruder said he was in a rush, then 94% of students allowed them to jump the queue. But what is really fascinating is that if the intruder argued that he has to jump the queue because he has to make copies (nonsensical request) still 93% of students allowed them to jump the queue.

Queues are so mind-numbing that we literally shut off our brains. When approached by an intruder, all we register is the word “because” and let the intruder pass, because – well – he gave a reason, didn’t he?

I do not advocate jumping queues. Quite the opposite. Socially well-adapted people are queuing properly and don’t complain about it. Yet, there are tricks that one can follow to shorten the wait and make it less boring and mind-numbing. What these tricks are will be revealed next Friday. 

You just have to be patient and wait a little…