A city in waiting

I have a friend who beams at the sight of a really long line. It could be a line for a sandwich, or for a beer, or for a flu shot. Doesn’t matter. Lines make her happy.

“We need more lines in this city,” she says.

My friend is recently back in Chicago after a few years in L.A., where the line for a cupcake can sometimes take 30 minutes to get through. Chicagoans may look at those lines, and lines in other places—the line for Stumptown coffee in Portland, or brunch, any brunch, in New York—and, not insensibly, feel superior. Or at least lucky.

To my friend, though, the lack of lines in Chicago suggests a lack of food worth waiting for.

Turns out that lines can do that—they can twist and bend our opinion of a restaurant before we even step inside. And though it would seem that lines are happening more often here, with permanent lines at Kuma’s, Great Lake, XOCO and the Violet Hour, it’s an old phenomenon. Because the lines have been here forever. They’ve just been hidden.

“There are invisible lines all over the place,” says Northwestern University’s Gary Alan Fine. Fine is NU’s John Evans Professor of Sociology and the editor of Social Psychology Quarterly. He’s also a food blogger and active member of LTHForum.com (handle: GAF)—so he’s not unfamiliar with the concept of waiting for food. The basic first-come, first-served tenet of the restaurant reservation system is exactly the same as that of a physical line, he says. “There’s no difference, other than the visibility.”

But that visibility is key, because people are to lines as Dobermans are to squirrels—we pounce on them, we’re drawn to them. Fine told me that this isn’t necessarily masochistic. “[Lines] validate the success of that particular institution,” he said. “So in that sense lines can beget lines.”

This is not good news for anybody who was waiting for the hype to die down before trying to get their hands on a Great Lake pizza. If Fine is right (and the fact that the wait time for a Great Lake pizza jumped from roughly 70 minutes to upwards of four hours after GQ named it the best pizza in America suggests he is), the line at Great Lake, both visible and invisible, may still be growing. And it may have been that line that caused the accolades to come in the first place. After all, Great Lake has been slow since it opened—its philosophy is to make pizzas in small, time-consuming batches. In that GQ piece, Alan Richman said of owner Nick Lessins: “No man is slower.” Maybe Richman was annoyed by the time he spent waiting in line. But it’s entirely possible that he wouldn’t have enjoyed the pizza as much if it had been made quicker.

“What the line does is sensitize the consumer to the experience,” Fine says. “And [people are] going to pay attention to the food. That attention can wind up being positive or negative, but in general they’ve invested that time, so they are prone to say—sociopsychologically—that that investment was worthwhile. So they’re prone to say: This is great pizza. Because only an idiot would stand that long in line if the pizza was only so-so.”

Same goes for the burgers, the churros and the cocktails.

Of course, it can go the other way, too. “If the pizza for them is unsatisfying, [people] will probably treat it more negatively than they otherwise might have,” Fine says. “It eliminates the middle ground.”

Which explains why Great Lake’s Yelp page has more vitriol than a Fox News story on Obama.

So the most democratic system there is can lead to biased thinking. The way around this? The businesses that have long lines could open other locations, a process whereby, Fine says, “they would likely sell more hamburgers…but they would become less iconic.” Because the lines are what made them icons in the first place.

So people like my L.A. friend will be happy to know that the lines are probably here to stay. Which means we, too, will be a city of waiting, waiting for everything—except more of the lines themselves.

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