Zsolt ZsembaStanding in Line for a Phone? It’s a Problem.
The Line Is the Symptom
Every year, without fail, the same footage appears. People camped outside a store. Sleeping bags on concrete. Folding chairs and takeaway containers, and the quiet collective delusion that this is a reasonable way to spend a Tuesday. All of it for a phone. A shoe. A burger from a restaurant that opened last week. A toy that every kid on the block apparently cannot survive without.
The line is not the problem. The line is just where the problem becomes visible. The actual problem is what got those people there. The need to be first. The need is so powerful that it overrides sleep, work, and any honest assessment of whether the thing is worth what it costs to obtain it.
The iPhone Line Is Peak Stupidity
The new iPhone comes out every year. Every year, it is marginally better than the last one. Every year, people who already own a perfectly functional phone decide that marginal improvement is worth camping outside a retail store for twelve to thirty-six hours.
The phone will be available to everyone within a week. The person who waited a day and a half will have the exact same device as the person who ordered online during their lunch break three weeks later. No functional difference. Only the brief evaporating satisfaction of having it first. That satisfaction lasts roughly as long as it takes to open the box, post the unboxing photo, and go back to using a phone the same way everyone else uses a phone. A day of your life for that.
The Sneaker Obsession Is Its Own Special Madness
Sneaker culture has produced a version of this even more disconnected from reality. People queuing overnight for a shoe with a specific colorway and a celebrity attached to the marketing. A shoe that, in many cases, will never be worn because wearing it reduces resale value. The point was never to wear it. The point was to own it, photograph it, and display it as a trophy of having stood on concrete for eight hours.
There are grown adults with shoe collections worth more than their savings account. People who have turned acquiring footwear into the organizing principle of their free time and social identity. A shoe. We are talking about a shoe.
The Hype Food Queue Is the Worst One
At least the phone does something. At least the shoe can theoretically be worn. The hype food queue makes the least sense of all, and it keeps happening. A new restaurant opens. A food blogger posts. The algorithm picks it up. Within seventy-two hours, people are queueing two hours for what is by any honest assessment a burger, a taco, or a croissant with something unusual inside it.
The food will not taste two hours better than the food you did not queue for. What you are actually paying for is the content. The photo. The ability to say you were there before the hype moved on. You waited not for the food but for the social proof that you ate it while it was still the thing everyone was talking about. That is an expensive way to eat a mediocre burger.
Being First Is Not an Achievement
The obsession with being first is dressed up as enthusiasm, but it is actually insecurity. The need to be the person who had it before anyone else. The status that comes from being seen as plugged in enough, connected enough, cool enough to have the thing on day one.
None of that is about the thing. All of it is about how much of a person’s identity has been outsourced to what they own and when they owned it. That is a fragile way to build a sense of self, and it requires constant feeding. The next release. The next drop. The next queue. Because the satisfaction from the last one faded, and now you need another hit of being first at something.
Lines Are a Tax on People Who Cannot Wait
Waiting in line is a time tax. Time is the one thing you cannot get back, earn more of, or store for later. Every hour on concrete outside a retail store is gone. Not invested. Not spent on something that grows or produces anything. Gone in exchange for being slightly ahead of the curve on a product that will be outdated within eighteen months.
The brands understand this perfectly. The queue is not an inconvenience they want to eliminate. It is a marketing tool. It generates footage, social content, and signals scarcity. You are not waiting despite the hype. You are the hype. Your presence in that line is free advertising for a brand selling you something you could have bought later without the sleeping bag and the concrete.
The Obsession Beyond Stability
Enthusiasm for things is healthy. Caring about quality and design is fine. None of that requires a queue. The version that requires a queue has moved past enthusiasm into something else. When the desire for an object overrides work, sleep, and basic cost-benefit thinking, that desire has become the organizing principle of a person’s decisions. Giving up large portions of your finite life to be first in possession of a mass-produced item suggests something more important is missing, and the item is filling a space it was never designed to fill.
Just Wait
The phone will be there next week. The shoe will appear on resale platforms within days. The restaurant will still be serving that burger in three months when the queue is gone, and you can walk straight in and sit down like a person with a functioning relationship with their own time.
Nothing that requires standing in line for hours to own it first is worth standing in line for hours to own it first. Nothing. The thing is always replaceable. The hours you spent on that concrete are not.
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Lynda
Tech Consumers
Tobias Kremkau