It's Time to Ditch the Lines: How Queue Culture Has Spiraled Out of Control | Vanity Fair

What are you waiting for?

It’s a serious question. Because unless you need an organ transplant or are trying to vote in a Southern state, there is basically no good reason to join the end of a very lengthy queue—to slowly shuffle forward, sandwiched between a pair of strangers, for more than a few moments of your one wild and precious life. This truth is self-evident no matter what might be promised at the end of that inessential line: a new rhode bronzer; a cache of rare Labubus; a four-ounce cup of whimsically flavored status yogurt.

Yes, gratification cannot and should not be instant in every scenario. (This is why LLMs are destroying all we hold sacred.) At the same time, line culture has gotten out of control. As anyone who lives in a big city knows, it’s frighteningly easy to fritter away the bulk of our waking hours moving from one line to another: waiting for single-origin coffee, for rush tickets, for sneakers, for bar seating at the Michelin-starred restaurant that maddeningly doesn’t take reservations. And those are just the normal lines—not the special-occasion ones that require more serious temporal investment.

As trend story after trend story after trend story published this summer implies, the lines are particularly pervasive in New York—which must be called the city that never sleeps because it’s impossible to sleep standing up. Unless you’re a horse. And in New York, even the horses have to stand in—or as they’d say, “on”—line. Ever seen the southern edge of Central Park at hansom cab rush hour?

I think we’d all do well to adopt an edict I just invented called the 30 Rock rule. A wait in line should last no more than 22 minutes. If it goes on longer than that—the length of one episode of Tina Fey’s canonical sitcom—whatever’s at the end of that rainbow simply does not deserve you.

Big Line, of course, would have you thinking otherwise. Line culture feeds on and is fed by a DSM’s worth of modern-day maladies: FOMO, herd mentality, the sunk-cost fallacy. Most insidiously, line culture lures its practitioners into a false sense of democracy. Sure, I’ve been standing here forever, a line lingerer might think—but so have all these other people. And eventually, each of us will have our eternal reward. Waiting among a group of the like-minded can induce a sense of camaraderie, of community; there’s a reason that the Park Slope Food Coop’s official newsletter is called the Linewaiters’ Gazette.

But these good feelings are a lie. There is no honor in waiting for the sake of waiting; Roger Ebert had it right when he wrote, “Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.” Like everything else, lines also can and are gamed by those with the means to do so. In (again, sorry) New York, there’s an entire cottage industry of professional line sitters who promise to ease the friction of liminal purgatory: who will happily idle in one-, two-, three-hour lines to assure that their clients can get the latest iPhone, or prime viewing spots for the Knicks’ victory parade, or, even now, a Cronut, without having to stand around all day themselves. Lines are a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.

The only real value line culture holds is as a window to the soul. I asked my coworkers to name the most ridiculous thing for which they’ve ever queued up, and their answers were more illuminating than an enneagram. “I waited four hours for the Row sample sale two days after I had my appendix out and gave myself a hernia,” said one. “I waited two and a half hours in a virtual queue to get my kid signed up just to be able to audition for her school’s musical. She’s eight,” said another. Each response is a perfect Hemingway-esque short story: “I waited for hours, starting at 3 a.m., to get a seat inside the courtroom for Trump’s arraignment in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. (I got in.)” “I waited 10 minutes for an elevator today.” My own answer is too humiliating to spell out—I graduated from high school in 2006, and the final book in a series about a certain boy wizard was released in 2007. You do the math—but it does explain a lot about me.

Yes: One woman’s Yayoi Kusama mirror room is another woman’s Eras Tour. Humanity is a rich tapestry! But there are so many ways to get to know each other, and ourselves, besides voluntarily wasting our most finite resource: time itself. So please, hold the line. It’s not about the journey—it’s about the destination.

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