The numbers come first. Decades of retail operations research have been built on a single premise: every second a customer waits is a second closer to losing the sale. That premise is being quietly retired.
A new behavioral pattern — researchers are calling it 'conspicuous waiting' — is turning the queue from a cost center into a marketing asset. The driver is Gen Z, and the mechanism is social media.
Temple University Fox School of Business professor Subodha Kumar put it plainly to Fortune: 'Forget about just reducing the cost. We can have a line as a signal of value.' Kumar argues that businesses should now think about queues in three distinct ways: as an experience, as a signal, and as a commitment device. Consumers who post their place in line are not just documenting a purchase — they are broadcasting a status claim, validating the brand's scarcity, and recruiting the next wave of customers before they have ever tasted the product.
The concept borrows from Thorstein Veblen, the Gilded Age economist who coined 'conspicuous consumption' — the idea that people signal status through expensive, exclusive purchases. Where Veblen's consumer bought a fur coat to be seen, today's consumer posts a 45-minute bakery queue to achieve the same social effect at a fraction of the price. Fortune's framing: democratized snobbery.
The line, in other words, is no longer what happens before the experience. For a growing share of consumers, it is the experience.
Not everyone finds this development uplifting. Richard Larson, the MIT operations researcher known in academic circles as 'Dr. Queue,' told Fortune he gets 'quite depressed' watching supermarket lines where every customer stands head-bowed over a phone. 'In the old days,' Larson said, 'strangers in a queue would talk to each other.' The smartphone filled the void of waiting but eliminated the incidental human contact that came with it.
Larson draws a sharp distinction, however, between the dead-eyed DMV line and the queue outside a Broadway theater or a viral bakery. In the latter case, he said, 'everyone in the queue shares the same enthusiasm. The wait becomes part of the event.' Social media amplifies that dynamic: the line acquires a narrative arc — arrival, anticipation, payoff — that is content in its own right, independent of whatever is being sold at the front of it.
The theoretical backbone runs deeper than Veblen. Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang invented classical queueing theory more than a century ago while working for a telephone company; his congestion formulas remain the dominant analytical framework for queue management. Larson built on that lineage to make data-driven queue management a mainstream operations tool, famously recommending mirrors in elevator lobbies and free-goods incentives to reduce perceived wait times.
What neither Erlang nor early retail strategists anticipated was that consumers would eventually monetize the wait themselves — turning captive time into reach, impressions, and brand endorsement that no advertising budget can fully replicate.
CEO Times take: Free enterprise has always rewarded businesses that read consumer behavior faster than their competitors. The companies that recognize the queue as an earned media channel — rather than an operations failure to be engineered away — will extract real value from what their rivals are still treating as friction. Capital rewards clear rules, and the rule here is straightforward: scarcity, when it is genuine and visible, compounds. The brands that understand this are not manufacturing inconvenience; they are letting market signals do what market signals do. The market has already voted, one posted queue at a time.
