The Line Is The Thing

Image Credit: My iPhone

I just moved to New York, and at this point I spend more time standing in lines or hearing about lines than I'd like to admit. I've made peace with it.

Some things I've personally watched happen this summer:

• Fifty people outside a Greenpoint ice cream shop before it even opens. Strollers and dogs included.

• A multi-day encampment outside a Swatch store, with people paid to hold spots overnight.

• A line for a seemingly random food truck by Rockefeller Center that spans an entire block (pictured above)

New Yorkers used to hate this. Waiting in line was the thing you complained about, the plot of half of Seinfeld. Jerry, George, and Elaine stuck outside a restaurant, watching their night disappear, and nobody once pulled out a phone to document it.

Now the line is the whole appeal.

Here's the part that gets skipped over though: this isn't new behavior, it's just moved. Twenty years ago, the thing everyone wanted to wait for wasn't a bagel, it was a Gmail invite. You couldn't buy your way in. Somebody had to vouch for you. Getting access before your friends did was the flex. That's the same instinct running the line outside the ice cream shop right now, it just left the inbox and got up off the couch.

Everyone wants to blame FOMO or the algorithm for why we're all suddenly fine standing on a sidewalk for an hour, and sure, that's part of it. But I think it's more that we spend so much time "connected" on our phones that we've ended up more disconnected than ever, and some part of us knows it. Standing next to a stranger for forty-five minutes is a weirdly effective cure for that, even if neither of you says a word.

There was a piece in New York Magazine about this exact thing, and one detail has stuck with me since I read it: a woman waiting in a hundred-person fro-yo line said her boyfriend had built her a PowerPoint of her favorite fro-yo spots, using AI. So we're now using AI to plan the parts of our lives that are supposed to feel spontaneous, and then spending the time it saved us standing on a sidewalk, sweating next to strangers, waiting on something that took five minutes to actually make. Same technology, opposite job.

And it's rarely really about the product. My sister told me about the line outside Dairy Boy on Nantucket this summer, people waiting to get into a store that sells the exact same stuff online. Nobody's doing that for the merch. They're doing it for the bag. You walk around the island holding it and everyone knows exactly where you've been. The line isn't the obstacle between you and the thing, the line is the thing.

I think about my mom talking about “appointment TV”, everyone watching the same episode of Friends on the same Thursday night so they'd have something to talk about the next morning. We don't really have that anymore. Everyone's watching something different, at their own pace, on their own feed. But standing in an actual line does the same job that appointment TV used to do. It's the one thing a bunch of strangers agreed to show up for at the same time, and for an hour, you're all in on it together.

The businesses winning attention right now aren't the ones faking scarcity with a stunt or a countdown timer. They're the ones that figured out how to build an actual reason for people to stand next to another human for an hour and create an experience. 

That's a much higher bar than a discount code, and most brands aren't built to clear it.