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 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.