Queuing Etiquette

[jaeger]

When you queue in a shop, there are basic courtesies which should be common sense and vary depending on the shop. These aren't you being nice to people, these are you following the rules. As an example that will make sense to everyone, you don't slow your car down when people are crossing the road in front of you in order to be nice, you do it because that's the rule.

People seem to miss this sort of thinking when doing such things as queuing in a shop.

In a supermarket, you don't have much room to wiggle. They tend to have channeled checkouts and once you've queued, you're pretty much locked in. You have your stuff on the conveyer thing, people have lined up behind you, you're stuck. Supermarkets require you to pick a queue and stick to it, regardless of whether remaining in the queue is in your best interest or that of other people. The best you can do is let the person behind you go ahead of you if they have fewer items or seem strung out - and that is just being nice and has nothing to do with rules or etiquette.

However, in a shop with a counter that you approach, which may have one or more registers on it (such as at McDonald's), there is definite etiquette. You do not simply find the register with the fewest people in front of it and join that line, regardless of who else is waiting. You form a single queue (or blobby mass of waiting customers) and when one of the people behind the counter says "Next please!" (or, more likely, stares aimlessly into space and then sneers at you because you haven't approached, as you know that half the time you do so they say "Just a moment, I'm busy." and you have to go back to the queue anyway) you branch off to that available counter.

That sounds confusing, and because many people apparently need a diagram to get this into their skulls, I've whipped one up:

 

The one at the top is the correct, polite, (what should be) common sense way of queuing. It means that you are served in the order you arrived (and you can always let someone ahead of you if you know they're just there for something minor), rather than just having the luck of getting in behind the pack of twenty people who turned out to be there together and left all at once, rather than individually queued as other people suspected. It also means that if a new register opens, those who have been there longer get to move over first, rather than being penalised for having been waiting in line already.

In the past few months, however, even the second (wrong!) way of doing things hasn't seemed to work!

I was at Hungry Jack's on Swanston St in Melbourne. The store is very wide, so the correct method of queuing doesn't work; instead, there are two clear channels, so you can form two main queues which then branch off. Despite this, everyone still just lines up in front of one specific register.

Because everyone else does this and it was very clear that I'd never, ever get served unless I did it too, I queued in that way. It was very clear which register I was in front of. Yet someone stood less than a foot to my right (even though there was several people in line behind me already), and when I was next in line he stepped forward. Naurally, this meant he almost bumped into me. He yelled at me, threw his hands in the air, stared at the girl behind the counter, and then said "Fine, I won't bother then!" and stormed out.

Um... what?

The only explanation I can think of is that he thought I was one queue further to the left than I was, and that all those people in line behind me were just really dumb and didn't bother getting into the empty queue next to us. Seriously, he was standing between two registers. Lunacy.

In a similar case, I went to McDonald's on Swanston St in Melbourne. A woman joined the queue to my left. No-one was queued to my right. I had been queuing almost three times as long as the new arrival. A new register opened to my right and asked for the next waiting customer. The woman to my left tried to cut across me as I moved over, and then stopped and stared at me as I naturally reached the counter ahead of her, then sooked and walked off.

Again... what could she possibly have been thinking?

Yesterday, I was at KFC at Highpoint Shopping Centre (in Melbourne! Who would have guessed?). An older woman approached from my right and asked me which queue I was in: "This one?" or "That one?". I explained I was in "This one." and indicated the queue and the register it belonged to. She snapped in a very rude tone "So you mean that one?" and indicated my queue, then joined the one to my right (the original "That one."). I then said, clearly, "Do not speak to me that way." and continued waiting as she muttered stuff about people not being clear or lining up properly (as a result, people near her walked off).

She was clearly a loon.

But then... oh, but then!... I remembered having gone to KFC on Swanston St in Melbourne and having a girl do the line-cheating (ie, jumping in to a suddenly shorter line rather than letting people who had waited longer go first). She then stood across two registers, so I had to call over her to place my order. When I did get beside her, she kept swaying against me and whacking me with a bag twice her own width.

When I then got to Flinders St Railway Station and went through the ticket validation queue (which are similar to the turnstile things in New York subway stations, if that helps any Americans picture them) she couldn't feed her ticket through (because she kept jamming it in, rather than letting it feed), held her bag horizontally so that it blocked the barrier next to her (mine!), then couldn't get through the barrier because the idea of turning her bag to the side didn't occur to her (further delaying me) and then had her bag block my access to the escalators.

Which was, in the space of ten minutes, half a dozen instances of queuing abuse.

Le sigh.

What's even worse are people who cross the road (or reach the end of escalators) and then just stop. If you're crossing the road behind them then you better just get used to standing on the road, because they're blocking the footpath and that's that! At the end of escalator, who cares if the thing is moving under your feet, people are pressing against you and there is no way to move around the person because it has walls? They want to stop and that's their prerogative.

And to the women in their 30s who buy something, then lay out their purse and slowly and careful replace any cards they've used and place each denomination of change into a pre-selected slot: why should you care that a dozen people could have been served in that time? Why should I expect you to move to the side and then do that? (And why does this happen primarily in toy shops?)

Aldi and its incompetent queuers need their own post, I think!

Comments

[From: haruka]

When I worked in KFC here in Canada (two different stores) they had corral bars to line the customers up in like cattle. It solved MOST queueing problems, but there were always the odd few who walked around the bars and came straight to my counter. *sigh*

My wife absolutely HATES the 'people who stop abruptly and just stand there.' Not just at the top of escalators, but in the middle of a mall hallway. If you must stop and chat for twenty minutes, move out of the line of traffic!