Pick A Queue And Stick To It
Every queue leads to the same place
Long queues at the checkout counter in a supermarket or a mall can seem overwhelming, especially on a weekend. You have a trolley or a basket full of items for consumption over the next week and you can’t wait to get back home with all that stuff and resume your life. Looking at the long queue at every cashier’s counter you wonder whether it would have been smarter to order all this online. But you also want the shopping experience of a supermarket — the long and wide array of items of all kinds, packaged in colorful designs and available in many shapes and sizes. The abundance in the supermarket gives an assurance that things are not so bad in the world and that there is enough supply to last for a long time.
You choose the queue at the second cashier’s counter (the second queue). You had already examined the first and third queues and noticed that the first queue had fewer people but their trolleys were overstuffed. And the third queue had more people, and in that, you just saw a child picking two chocolate bars and putting them in her mother’s basket of items (that would add a few seconds more in the billing time).
Satisfied with your decision you patiently wait for your queue to progress. You heave a sigh of relief when the man with the largest number of items (an overstuffed trolley and a full basket) collects his bill and moves on with his items. You take a step forward with elation and it shows in your radiant smile. But that smile vanishes when you notice that the next person hasn’t moved on for the last two minutes. Two minutes! You lean forward to see what went wrong. You see the cashier nodding her head sideways and returning the old lady her card. The old lady must have forgotten the pin of her credit card (or debit card). Now the old lady pulls out her purse and is sifting through the cash she has. She pulls up some currency notes and begins counting them, confirms the amount with the cashier, then continues to count. She opens a zip in her purse and takes out some coins. The cashier gestures that she can provide her with loose change but the old lady seems adamant. She gestures to her not to bother and continues to count the coins.
You get fed up with waiting and decide to move to another queue. Again you compare the first and third queues. You feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in each trolley in the first queue and decide to join the third queue that has nearly double the number of people. Also, the third queue is most suitable for you since you only have nine items and that queue is for people with 10 or fewer items. Five minutes later three people have already moved out of the third queue and the old lady from the second queue moves out just then. You pat yourself for the smart and timely decision to change queue. You again feel restless when your queue is the only one not moving ahead. You’re so far behind that you’re not sure what’s the hold-up. You ask those ahead of you and they ask those ahead of them. You shake your head and raise your hands in disbelief when they tell you that the card scanning machine is not working anymore and that they’ve made it a cash-only counter.
“Do they not have any extra machines for a situation like this?” you ask in disbelief to the one ahead of you, who just shrugs his shoulder and pulls out his wallet to check whether he has enough cash. The woman standing ahead of him does the same. The whole queue is now counting the cash they may have at the moment, to ensure they have enough to retain their position in the queue. You only have a currency note of 100. You need 125. You look at the nine items you’ve bought, that are quietly lying in the basket you’re holding in your hand, and wonder whether it was worth buying them here. Could this have waited? Could you have bought these in a small shop across the road from your apartment?
Since you are here and holding these items, you don’t feel like abandoning them. You are certain that even such items don’t like being abandoned. You decide to protect their feelings while your feelings were all over the place. You take a deep breath and move to the second queue (your original queue). By the time it took you to complete your inner monologue, make that decision, and move your body to that queue, two people with their full trolleys join the queue before you could.
You want to scream. But who cares? Also, they may force you to leave on the grounds of inappropriate conduct in a public place. Plus the embarrassment. And for what? Nine items sitting in your shopping basket? You tightly clutch onto the handle of your basket with such ferocity that you imagine it crumbling under your grip. You don’t want to punish innocent items for the mismanagement of the supermarket and the greed of people who are filling their trolleys.
What ridiculous items people buy, you exclaim to yourself when you’re standing in the queue observing the items that the two people who joined in just before you had bought. Two jumbo bottles of coca cola, five cylindrical-shaped boxes of pringles, three packets of frozen food, ten different varieties of biscuits, a bedsheet, etc. You can’t see anything beyond that. The other trolley was filled with chocolates, diapers, and packaged juices. You look at the nine times you’d bought, reclining in various positions quietly in your basket, and you feel proud of buying something of utility.
The queue moves ahead. You look to your left and sigh again. You decide to ignore that you see that only one person from the previous batch remained in that queue (the first queue) while you still had three people ahead of you, all with sufficiently full trolleys. You do the math and conclude that had you joined the first queue or remained loyal to the second queue you could have been on your way out in the next couple of minutes. Loyalty is so underrated, you conclude, and send a loving message to your spouse.
