For me, one of life’s great pleasures is standing at the bar in a pub and resting my elbow on the counter while vertical drinking and putting the world to rights. Thankfully, most establishments have a decent length of counter, which dates to railway architecture in the 1830-1840s.

The modern-day expansive bar counter was created to ease the frantic clamour for food and drinks ahead of trains departing in major stations. They replaced small serving hatches that resulted in long queues forming and saw many missed food orders and trains. The new system enabled multiple people to be served simultaneously by a team of servers behind the long bar counter.

It is rather perverse therefore that some pubs have found certain customers reviving the queue almost two centuries after we found the perfect solution to this time-consuming problem. It is undoubtedly a throwback to the pandemic, when social distancing led to orderly single file queues being a necessity. 

But it is completely unnecessary today, and the case against it has recently been argued eloquently by Hamish Glenn, managing director of Hackney Church Brew Co, who became frustrated with queues regularly snaking out the door of his taproom, despite it having a lengthy bar and plenty of serving staff behind it. He garnered lots of publicity over his campaign to end the pub queue and says that the week after he managed to banish it, the bar’s like-for-like sales increased by 25% on the previous week, based on the same number of customers.

Maybe this propensity to queue is not just a post covid-19 hangover but highlights how we are developing a very different relationship with queues within a hospitality context. I’ve grown up with an aversion to anything that looks like a line of people stood behind each other. In my opinion, food and drink can very rarely be worth queuing for – especially if it is merely fuelled by some influencer on TikTok or Instagram.

But this thinking is very much old school. A survey in the US found 60% of Generation Z consumers had waited in line for more than 30 minutes for a specific food. And among all age groups, a hefty 74% of those said the wait was worth it. Apparently, waiting in line makes people order more, and the resultant food and drink tastes better. 

Research by Neir Eshel, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the renowned Stanford University in the US, found that an increase in the amount of effort put in increases the amount of dopamine (the feel-good hormone) we experience. The baked spud you waited three hours for really was the best you’ve ever tasted!

What we can’t also discount here is the camaraderie-type dynamic that builds up in queues and becomes part of the experience. For younger consumers, this is rich IRL (“in real life”, if you didn’t know) behaviour. Non-bookable restaurant Dishoom has played on this scenario and dispenses free drinks to those in the inevitable long lines outside its venues. 

Despite these upsides, not everybody (including me) is up for long waits in a line. Virtual queuing is therefore an option for restaurants, whereby customers are able to show up once they have been notified via their mobile that they are now near the front of the virtual line. And in the US, the website Damnlines has gone all high-tech in its use of artificial intelligence and camera technology to monitor queue lines outside popular venues in New York City. It pays people with apartments near these establishments to install webcams pointed at the restaurant, and from the feed, it can build up historical data that enables it to calculate the optimum times for joining queues.

Here in the UK, certain operators including Kricket and the owners of Palomar have addressed the popularity of their venues by opening a bar or running the pub next to their restaurants where the queue – of walk-ins – can have a good time while waiting, and also, very importantly, spend money with that operator. 

Although I’m not sure I’m ever going to embrace the queue mentality, it is undoubtedly a serious phenomenon in the hospitality industry today as influencers and social media platforms play an increasingly informative role. Sadly, not every business can regularly attract queues out the door and down the road, but those that do must handle it with great care.

Glynn Davis, editor, Beer Insider

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Beer Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.