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The longest line I ever stood in took six hours, and it was to watch the tennis tournament at Wimbledon. It’s a long queue, but not an uncomfortable one. There’s plenty of space and people are nice—the crowd’s energy only grew as we got closer to the gates.
Tickets for the three other Grand Slam tennis tournaments can get pretty expensive, but Wimbledon organizers decided that everyone should pay the same fair price. The downside: if you want a ticket, you need to wake up early. The upside: you don’t need money to watch the games in London; you just need to be a committed enough tennis fan to brave the queue.
The weirdest queue I know is at Berlin’s infamous nightclub, the Berghain. Potential guests can’t be sure whether their hour-long wait will pay off until the very last minute. That’s because the club tries to establish a “good mix of people” each night to provide the best possible experience. So the bouncers are hyper-selective about who they let in, and it will be a function of the other people in the queue. Sometimes you’ll get in, and other times you’ll be turned down.
Whether a queue is the best system to organize resources, and whether it’s fair or not—most of that is our own perception. But what we think of the system says as much about us as it does about the queue itself.
To queue or not to queue
People usually organize scarce resources by setting prices for them. If something is especially rare it will be more expensive, and common goods will be on the cheaper side.
This doesn’t always feel fair. Organizers of the Wimbledon tournament chose a different approach: keep the price low and let the queue decide who gets in. They want to welcome all tennis fans, even the ones who are less well off; whoever’s willing to spend half a day waiting deserves to experience the tournament.
But could they somehow get the same self-selection going without people actually needing to stand in the line? Couldn’t the organizers, for example, ask each person when they’re willing to join the queue, and establish a rank according to the answers? This way everyone could get their tickets in advance and not have to spend time waiting. Think of all we could accomplish if we didn’t have to spend time waiting in line.
But it’s easy to see how this new system would require something that’s difficult to come by in real life: trust.
Everyone could say they're willing to wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning to get to Wimbledon—but would they actually? Well, if there’s a queue, we know for sure. The queue system works exactly because it calls everyone’s bluff.
We appreciate symmetry
A queue sends a clear signal of mass cooperation. It’s “designed” to trigger everyone’s instinct for reciprocity: when we follow the queue’s rules, we also ensure that others subject themselves to the same rules.
Traffic is one example of a more asymmetrical system. Everyone who drives a car needs to make their own choices about their exact route and speed. Put together, all these decisions create a dynamic, which has an effect on each participant, feeding back to their next decisions. Just a few extra cars on a road can introduce heavy traffic jams elsewhere.
In mathematics, game theory studies these interactions among rational decision-makers. The Wardrop principles describe two different approaches to optimizing a traffic scenario:
- In user equilibrium, each driver chooses the route that gives them the shortest travel time—even if this contributes to congestion and makes others' drives longer.
- In an optimal system, the community’s resources are spent best. Everyone takes whatever route necessary (even if it's a little longer for them personally) for the total of all drivers' travel times to be as low as possible.
For an optimal system scenario, we’d need to assign a route to every driver and have them take it, and this might very well be against their own best interest. What’s even worse: without a central authority, they won’t know which route to take.
A queue isn’t always the fairest system, but it’s simple and it’s symmetrical. There’s power in the fact that the same rules apply to everyone. Queues allow complete strangers to cooperate without a central authority.
Punishment that fits the crime
Most people understand how a queue works: first come first served, and if you leave you’re out. Slipping into the line at any place other than the back is harshly sanctioned, and the penalty comes from other members. It doesn’t take any outside help to police the line—the enforcers are the people standing right next to you.
Social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in which he asked participants to cut in line. In the study, he described responses ranging from verbal objections to actual physical violence. Milgram’s experiment showed how effectively these internal sanctions guard against people jumping the queue. Many intruders procrastinated or paced nervously near the line—for some, it took as much as a half-hour to attempt jumping the queue.
Next time you enter a line that moves slowly, just remind yourself that you’re participating in one of our society’s greatest achievements: spontaneous cooperation between strangers. And if that doesn’t make you happy, remember that the alternative would be either a central authority or an angry mob. In the end, we all get what we queue for. And it’s only fair.
