The rise of ‘conspicuous waiting’: The 19th-century economic theory that explains why Gen Z posts their place in line

The Gilded Age economist Thorstein Veblen famously wrote about “conspicuous consumption,” the idea that people signal status by buying expensive, exclusive things. If he were witnessing the behavior of Gen Z in urban areas today, he might need to coin a new phrase: conspicuous waiting. Or maybe, democratized snobbery.

Companies have spent decades racing to shave seconds off the checkout line, the drive-through, the loading spinner. Every second longer that a customer waits is a second closer to losing the sale — or so the thinking has gone. But businesses have also always known that captive attention has value. The candy bars and celebrity gossip magazines arranged at eye level beside every checkout lane weren’t put there by accident: a waiting customer is a customer whose attention can still be monetized. Businesses figured that out long before smartphones arrived. What they didn’t anticipate was that consumers would eventually turn the wait into content themselves.

“Forget about just reducing the cost,” said Subodha Kumar, a professor of statistics, operations and data science at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. “We can have a line as a signal of value.” 

As technology removes friction from nearly every transaction, the experiences people still willingly wait for have become increasingly valuable — and increasingly public. They’re not just posting what they bought. They’re posting the line.

“They are also posting pictures of the line,” Kumar said. That shift matters. Social media has changed the role a queue can play: instead of only documenting what they bought, consumers increasingly turn the entire experience into content — from getting ready and waiting to trying the product itself. The line is no longer something that happens before the experience. For many consumers, it is the experience.

For businesses, Kumar said, those lines have become an asset. Rather than viewing every minute in a queue as a cost to eliminate, businesses can think about lines in three ways: as an experience, as a signal, and as a commitment device.

The line as an experience

Richard Larson, the MIT operations researcher known as “Dr. Queue,” has spent his career thinking about what happens when people wait. Lately, it’s been making him a little sad.

“As Dr. Queue, I get quite depressed sometimes,”........

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