New York has always had lines for the sorts of experiences you can’t get anywhere else: Broadway tickets, skyscraper observation decks, Cronuts. This summer’s lines, though, can seem borderline ludicrous: three to a street, blocks long, often for the types of things you can get almost anywhere in the city, like bagels, pizza, and pastries. They emerged slowly over the past few years and then like a flood, a cumulative effect of TikTok constantly showing all of us what we are missing out on in our very own boroughs. The temptation is almost too strong — why not take the train 15 minutes to figure out if that slice of pizza is as good as everyone on your “For You” page is telling you it is? “It’s herd mentality,” one young woman, nearly rolling her eyes at herself for joining the masses, tells me at Myka, a fro-yo chain that is arguably the site of this summer’s longest lines. Now, across the city, especially along the Brooklyn waterfront and in much of downtown, people are waiting for an ever-diversifying assortment of viral snacks and “sweet treats” (to use the preferred language of Instagram influencers), all the while petting one another’s dogs, gossiping with friends, minding their toddlers, checking Slack, and scrolling away their remaining time in line. As one TikToker captioned a video taken in the West Village on the first nice day of spring in March, “The sun is out and New Yorkers are back with their favorite activity of waiting in line.” A company called Same Ole Line Dudes (tagline: We Wait for Your Wants!) will even wait in line for you, starting at a price of $55.
Naturally, some New Yorkers are getting persnickety about the situation. “I would never stand in a line. It just seems so déclassé,” the podcaster Francesca Root-Dodson tells me. When I run into a Real Housewife I know on my way to wait in line at Caffè Panna’s original location in Gramercy Park, she says, “When I was growing up here, standing in a line was not a cool thing. Now there’s a whole culture around it. The only thing worth waiting in line for is a Balenciaga sample sale.” The Caffè Panna line is monitored by a camera installed by a mysterious website called damnlines.com. (One Wednesday in July at 4:20 p.m., the website estimates a 25-minute wait; near 30 people are in line.) As such haters’ thinking usually goes, waiting in a line is the lemminglike behavior of tourists in Times Square trying to get a deal on last-minute tickets for The Lion King. Standing in a line is what you do pissily at the airport or Disney World. (Also, self-described real New Yorkers like to say you wait on line, not in one. The mere mention of this distinction can send people into long, impassioned debates about the importance of regional dialect.) “These kids today on these stupid lines,” Dorothy Wiggins, a 100-year-old influencer and West Village resident recently complained on Instagram. (Note her use of on.) “It’s crazy! Just crazy!” Her hairdresser, also featured in the video, shared that she would never stand in line because she grew up under communism.
Others have taken to championing the line people. “I don’t like when people make fun of the people who stand around in long lines,” the downtown writer known as Sotce recently wrote on her Substack. “Some people read Substack, some people wait in a line. Some people have vintage denim and read books by dead people. And really we all die.”
“I’m not somebody who would wait in line,” the owner of the Italian greyhound tries to assure me outside the Greenpoint Caffè Panna. Yet she has just done exactly that, waiting 15 minutes for her Nutella Crunch ice cream, which she doesn’t sound at all embarrassed about as she devours the ice cream in less time than it took to order it. “When you see there’s a line, it means the place is good,” her friend, the owner of the Maltipoo, tells me. Just the day before, she went to Caffè Panna’s other location, where she also waited in a line. Nearby, two sisters, tourists from Boston, snap photos of their scoops before digging in. “All the lines have felt worth it,” one tells me; for breakfast, they waited in a line at Apollo Bagels in Williamsburg. They’d seen all this hoopla on social media and couldn’t resist sussing out the hype for themselves. “I would rather stand in this line here than go figure out another place to go,” one says to me.
by Brock Colyar, Curbed | Read more:
Image: Natan Dvir
Whether it’s an hourlong wait for a shawarma at TikTok favorite Miya Miya in Los Angeles or a two-hour queue for pastries from the Cedric Grolet Opéra pastry shop in Paris, long lines for viral foods and popular restaurants have become a feature of urban landscapes. And summer is peak season for them.“These long lines circulate via social media,” says Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa. Posts of queues “create and re-create a representation of popularity and virality,” not just for locals, but for anyone online. A recently published study of tourists waiting in food lines in Amsterdam found that 84% of them had seen videos of those lines on TikTok and 54% on Instagram. Lines have become tourist attractions and social experiences in their own right.
Over the past year, I’ve lined up for coffee in Shanghai, for croissants in Edinburgh and for bagels, pizza, cinnamon buns and, most recently, frozen yogurt at home in New York — all with hordes of others joined in the belief that good things come to those who wait.
A recent survey of more than 3,000 US consumers found that 60% of Gen Z respondents reported waiting in line for more than 30 minutes for a specific food. Among all the age groups, 74% of those said the wait was worth it. Experience enough of these lines, and you’ll see they’re more than a byproduct of imbalanced supply and demand. They’re places where complex social, psychological and economic theories play out, one slow-moving step at a time.
Social media posts have made waiting for Mimi’s part of the experience for many customersPhotographer: Yuvraj Khanna for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the queue for Mimi’s, I passed the time people-watching, scrolling on my phone and chatting with line mates. Among them was Athena Yan, from Shenzhen, who’s studying for her master’s in urban planning at NYU. She told me she’d been drawn to Mimi’s by its online cachet, but now she appraised the queue through an urban planner’s lens. Lines like this, she said, offer a social benefit: They “make the street look more energetic, more alive.” Her interest wasn’t strictly academic. After conquering the line and procuring her yogurt, she said, “I’m going to post it to my Stories.”
by Matthey Kronsberg, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Yuvraj Khanna***
Early on the first summerlike evening of the year, New York’s Greenwich Village was abuzz. Restaurant patios were packed, with waiters shuttling bottles of crisp white wine to diners. On University Place, the queue for frozen yogurt at Mimi’s stretched half a block, bending around the corner. I considered joining it. A New York University student told me the line quadruples after 7 p.m. His friend chimed in to call it “the hottest club in New York.”Over the past year, I’ve lined up for coffee in Shanghai, for croissants in Edinburgh and for bagels, pizza, cinnamon buns and, most recently, frozen yogurt at home in New York — all with hordes of others joined in the belief that good things come to those who wait.
A recent survey of more than 3,000 US consumers found that 60% of Gen Z respondents reported waiting in line for more than 30 minutes for a specific food. Among all the age groups, 74% of those said the wait was worth it. Experience enough of these lines, and you’ll see they’re more than a byproduct of imbalanced supply and demand. They’re places where complex social, psychological and economic theories play out, one slow-moving step at a time.
Social media posts have made waiting for Mimi’s part of the experience for many customersPhotographer: Yuvraj Khanna for Bloomberg Businessweek
In the queue for Mimi’s, I passed the time people-watching, scrolling on my phone and chatting with line mates. Among them was Athena Yan, from Shenzhen, who’s studying for her master’s in urban planning at NYU. She told me she’d been drawn to Mimi’s by its online cachet, but now she appraised the queue through an urban planner’s lens. Lines like this, she said, offer a social benefit: They “make the street look more energetic, more alive.” Her interest wasn’t strictly academic. After conquering the line and procuring her yogurt, she said, “I’m going to post it to my Stories.”
by Matthey Kronsberg, Bloomberg | Read more:
[ed. Beats sitting on your couch at home watching tv, I guess.]
