It happens to all of us. You walk into a restaurant and announce your presence to the preternaturally cheerful hostess, who tells you, “It’ll be about 15 minutes.”
Then you glance at the packed dining room and lounge, and you think, “Fifteen minutes, my left ventricle.”
You know you’re not sitting down in 15 minutes. The hostess knows it. The guy at the bar who has already been waiting for 30 minutes knows it. And yet, you wait.
Why? Why do we endure 12-minute lines for a cup of coffee? Why do we wait for 60 minutes for an amusement park ride that lasts 60 seconds? And why do we reward no-reservations restaurants by meekly submitting to a 90-minute delay before being “allowed” to order dinner?
Inside, you’ll find–well, maybe not definitive answers but some interesting perspectives on the psychology of waiting. We talked to people in line and the people who were making them wait (restaurateurs, club owners, retailers). We learned about something called “line rage.” Perhaps you can guess what that entails.
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If nothing else, this should give you something to talk about while waiting this weekend at the museum, at the restaurant, at the club . . .
Estimated wait: Long! Will you stick it out?
Waiters of the world, I feel your pain.
No, not you put-upon restaurant servers. I feel your pain, sometimes, but this isn’t about you.
By “waiters” I mean people who must wait. The unseated restaurant patrons, their estimates of “it’ll be 10 minutes” already stretching past an hour with no table in sight. The luckless fellow in line for a simple cup of coffee, thwarted by the goof at the counter who’s scanning the menu board like a first-time visitor and asking what a venti tastes like. The people in the museum line, comparing their progress toward the entrance to that of the ant scurrying industriously alongside them, noting glumly that the ant is winning.
I hate waiting. But the great paradox of being a restaurant critic is that although I have the power to demand special treatment, it’s a power I dare not exercise. I do my job as an anonymous observer–no fair flashing my metaphoric critic’s badge to lay claim to that cozy corner booth.
But, boy, it’s tempting sometimes.
It’s bad enough that some places don’t accept reservations or reserve only a small percentage of their tables. Such policies are great for restaurateurs, because tables can be re-seated moments after the previous party leaves, and waiting guests often buy drinks at the bar–both of which increase profitability. But it’s frustrating for customers who arrive hungry at 8 p.m. only to learn they won’t be able to eat until 9:30 p.m.
At least patrons without reservations have an inkling of what they’re getting into. It’s much more irksome when lengthy waits are foisted on customers with reservations. These are people who called ahead and arrived at the appointed time; they fulfilled their part of the bargain, but they’re still stuck in the lounge, fuming.
Indeed, the frustration of waiting can result in what M.I.T. professor Richard C. Larson has characterized as “queue rage”–or what we prefer to call “line rage.” It can range from a fed-up party walking out to physical confrontations.
Alex Dana, who runs the Rosebud family of restaurants, recalled the day years ago when a customer waiting for a table had had enough and decided to leave.
The trouble was, he decided to take the reservation book with him.
“The guy grabs the reservation book from the hostess and runs out the door,” Dana said. “My whole month of business was in that book. I chased the guy down and tackled him, and now I’m wrestling this guy for my book. All because he was mad for waiting.”
None of the people we surveyed admitted to a reaction that severe. But when we asked 10 people waiting in various venues along Michigan Avenue, eight said they’d wait only so long before saying, in effect, “So long.”
“It depends on several factors, like what I’m waiting for, the mood I’m in and the company I’m with,” said Molly Murphy, who was waiting for service at the Apple Store when we caught up with her. “The time goes by faster if I’m with my girlfriends, but if I’m in a hurry, then I’ll get more aggravated.”
Murphy characterized her Apple wait (20 minutes and counting) as “not bad” and said she’ll wait “up to 60 minutes” for a restaurant table.
Murphy’s attitude is consistent with Larson’s findings. Larson, a professor of operations research who dubs himself “Doctor Q,” has published studies on “queueing theory” from physical and psychological viewpoints.
“Roughly speaking,” Larson said, “a person’s willingness to wait is proportional to the anticipated reward. If you were waiting for, let’s say, Red Sox-Cubs World Series tickets, you might be willing to camp out overnight for those. But if you’re just getting an order of a burger and fries, which you regard as generic, you don’t want to wait at all.”
Thus the less “special” the experience, the more crucial it is to eliminate waiting–or at least the appearance of waiting.
“Some fast-food franchises hire architects to hide their drive-through queues from the road, so by the time you realize the line is long, you’re trapped,” Larson said.
Another approach is to make the queue–whether it’s a literal waiting line or a vast waiting area–more pleasant.
“At Disney [theme parks], they line their queues with diversions such as cartoons that relate to the amusement up ahead, so in your mind the experience has already started,” he said.
Thus when a restaurant customer can order a drink and find a comfortable place to sit, the waiting is much more tolerable.
At the Canoe Club restaurant in Orland Park, where long waits are common on weekends even with reservations, there is a spacious bar with a plethora of TVs (screening anything from a Sox game to an Elvis movie) and a central shark tank–as well as a small army of bartenders filling drink orders. Indeed, said customer Bill Ringhofer, a little wait here is a good thing because it allows time to relax with a drink before sitting down to dine.
“A half hour,” Ringhofer said, “is beautiful.”
Kevin Brown, president and CEO of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, oversees an empire of restaurants that ranges from Everest, where every party has reservations, to Wao Bao and foodlife, concepts in which people wait in line to order food. In every restaurant waits sometimes occur.
“The way I’ve always looked at it is managed expectations,” Brown said. “If you tell somebody it’ll be an hour wait and it is an hour, they won’t be angry. But if you tell them it’ll be 15 minutes and it’s an hour, you’re going to upset people. They may stay, but they may think twice about coming back.”
When the wait is long at a retail checkout line, nobody expects a half-priced shirt as compensation. When the line to get into a museum stretches forever, nobody demands to get in free as a consequence.
But when things slow down at a restaurant, some customers expect a drink, a complimentary dessert–something. And often, restaurants comply.
“Our belief is, once you’re in the building, it’s our responsibility to start entertaining,” Brown said. “If the delay is very long, we might distribute pass-outs, let people sample food. We want them to think, `I may be waiting, but they’re certainly treating me like a guest.’ In a worst-case scenario, we’ll buy a drink, an appetizer–maybe the whole dinner in an extreme case.”
Extreme cases do occur because, contrary to popular belief, restaurants are not exactly pure democracies.
Restaurateur Dana used the example of a heavily booked weekend night to illustrate what can happen.
“If one of your regular customers shows up, you’re gonna get him a table,” Dana said. “Then you have to honor the hotels, because if the Four Seasons calls, you can’t tell the concierge, `No, no, no’ when they’re begging to get a table for a guest.”
(It’s worth noting that hotel concierges steer hundreds of customers to favored restaurants each year. Concierges have a good deal of clout.)
“So regulars go first; hotels go first,” Dana said. “That starts the backup. Then you get a call that a dignitary wants to come in. Every restaurant has that. You fight your way through it, and it works out.”
Restaurateurs allege that some customers deliberately ratchet up their anger in an attempt to secure freebies.
“Just this week, my hostess took a party to a table for two–only it was a party of three,” said Jimmy Bannos, owner of three Heaven on Seven restaurants. “The lady was screaming, outraged. This is like a three-minute changeover; we found them another table, and she just wouldn’t quit. I bought them a couple of appetizers, and she’s still ranting that she’s gonna get my license pulled.
“Finally she makes an ethnic remark about the hostess, and my manager says, `That’s it, time for you to leave.’ And the husband looks over and says, `All we wanted was to have our entrees picked up.'”
When it comes to nightclubs, however, the theory is that people, perversely, want to wait, that the very existence of a line creates desirability.
“I’ve always joked,” said Funky Buddha Lounge owner Mark Klemen, “that if you put a velvet rope in front of a Dumpster, people would line up to get in.”
Chris Dexter, who is a partner at several restaurants and nightclubs, including Del Toro and the recently opened Stone Lotus, recalled his days working at Whiskey Blue in New York City, when owner Rande Gerber would start a guest-list-only line at 4:30 p.m., just to make the club appear harder to get into.
“What it drilled into people,” Dexter said, “was that this place was exclusive, where you want to be.”
An interesting tactic, but one, Klemen said, that can backfire. “If I made you wait 15 minutes and when you get inside nobody’s there, you’re never going back,” he said.
These days, Dexter said, a club may hold a line outside to keep the inside crowd at a comfortable level. “If you let in 100 people at 7 p.m.,” he says, “and then people with reservations arrive at 9, you’ve got no place to put them. So it may seem pretentious, but we’re really trying to offer guests a better experience. And if you’re holding a line for the benefit of the customers inside, that’s seen as valuable.”
“Sometimes there is a reverse-psychology aspect to queues,” acknowledged Larson. “In the old USSR, the longer the line, the more attractive it was, because there was the fear that whatever people were waiting for today might be gone tomorrow.”
So what is the wait-hater to do?
There are various strategies one can employ, such as dining at 5 p.m., avoiding restaurants on weekends or patronizing uncrowded restaurants (some of which are superior to the packed trendy joints). Or you can pass the time by engaging in thumb wars with your dining companion or mentally inventing dramatic personal histories for the strangers waiting around you.
But ultimately, your power rests in your wallet and your feet. If reservations are important to you, patronize restaurants that take reservations seriously. If you’re being asked to wait too long, leave–and tell the host or manager why. Patience is one thing; martyrdom is another.
– – –
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Waiting in line? Take this quiz
If you relate to at least one of these statements, you may suffer from “line rage.”
You have “line rage” if . . .
. . . you find your hands wrapped around the maitre’d’s neck.
. . . you’ve ever cut in front of a woman the same age as your grandmother.
. . . you’ve ever raised your hand to honk your horn when you weren’t in your car.
. . . your throat is sore from exaggerated and unnaturally frequent clearings.
. . . your toe tapping can be heard more than a block away.
. . . you start dissecting the fashion, physical and personality flaws of everyone standing in front of you.
. . . you order delivery from one restaurant while in the waiting area of another restaurant.
. . . you talk loudly on your cell phone about how hungry/late/tired/pained you are, aiming for the guilt-trip seating.
–At Play staff
`When the wait becomes obnoxious, then we leave.’
We asked people, spotted in line at various establishments, for their perspectives on how long they were willing to wait and what made waits intolerable:
“We have a bad habit. We don’t make reservations. We walk in; if it’s crowded we leave. Forty minutes is too long. A half-hour maybe, too. It depends on how hungry you are.”
–Ilene Loonam, Burr Ridge, waiting in Pappadeaux restaurant in Westmont
“I was in a shoe store trying to attract attention for 45 minutes. I just left. Because you know what? It’s just shoes, and shoes are everywhere.”
–Sarah Shideler, Muncie, Ind., in checkout line at H&M
“In a restaurant, I’ll generally wait up to an hour and a half. I’m a fairly patient person.”
–Nancy Jones, Knoxville, Tenn., in line at Garrett Popcorn Shop
“Let’s face it, the best places have the longest lines. It’s just part of the drill.”
–Lisa Hunter, in a slow-moving line outside Sound-Bar
“One time I walked away from Heaven on Seven. The restaurant has really good food, very spicy, but the line was too long, I could see that.”
–Vivek Murthy, Bhopal, India, in line at Ghirardelli Chocolate
“I’ve been waiting 20 minutes, and that’s too long. I’m bored. In a regular restaurant, I’d wait 15 minutes. But because this one is a novelty, I’ll wait longer.”
–Samantha Wronski, Dumont, N.J., waiting outside Pizzeria Uno
“I think anger is correlated to how long you expect to wait. When you have reservations, you don’t expect to wait for an hour. When the wait becomes obnoxious, then we leave.”
–Jason Sheffield, Atlanta, outside Pizzeria Uno.
“I’m fine, because they’re going to give me what I want.”
–Haroon Rashid, Boston, five minutes into his wait at Starbucks
68 minutes
The Saxtons, a family of four from Hastings, Minn., are waiting. They wait, stand, yawn, twirl their thumbs and shuffle their feet every few minutes as a line more than a city block long inches toward the Shedd Aquarium on a recent Saturday.
1:15 P.M.
Parents Jane and Lee, and sons Ryan and Daniel enter the back of the line. Lee: “We’re excited. It’s going to be worth it.”
1:30 P.M.
Ryan, 11, is picking fruit off a nearby tree and tossing it in boredom. “I’m hot and tired.” Says mom Jane, “I’m doing great. I’m not impatient … yet.”
1:40 P.M.
Daniel, 8, and brother Ryan head for the shade. Their parents continue to stand. Lee: “Their legs are tired of standing.”
1:45 P.M.
The Saxtons are seven pavement squares from the stairs leading to the front door. The line slows down considerably. Ryan, withering in the sun: “It’s gotta be at least 85 degrees.”
1:47 P.M.
The family has moved three more pavement squares in five minutes. Daniel relocates to a nearby bench out of boredom.
2:00 P.M.
They’ve moved half a square. Ryan is drooped over his father’s hands, playing dead. Jane: “We’ve made no progress.”
2:08 P.M.
The Saxtons have made their way up the stairs and are steps from the entrance. Jane: “I’m encouraged.” Ryan: “It’s like the light at the end of the tunnel!”
2:12 P.M.
The family goes through the door . . . and . . . there’s another line inside for tickets. Lee: “If they had a sign outside with approximate waiting time, that’d be great.”
2:23 P.M.
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They finally reach the cashier and are about to begin their tour of the aquarium. How does Ryan feel? “Good.” Daniel? “Pretty good.” Jane? “Super.” And Lee? “I think they’ll like it. You wait a little bit longer for something like this.”
— Kevin Pang