h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My mother-in-law reckons that queuing really only started during the Second World War. She says that people didn't stand around waiting for things before then. How true is this? Does anyone know? It may be that there weren't as many things to queue for before then.

I rather suspect that queuing is an organically-generated answer to one of the great inequities in the system: As the population of anywhere increases, there are more people using services at the same time as everyone else (check out beaches or public parks during warm/hot weather), and the pace of service is geared to personal interactions.
(the exception to this is anything to do with banking or government, at which point, despite the use of computers systems (which may well date back to when Arthur and Ford walked the Earth with the telephone sanitisers) the entire transaction takes place at the speed of legislation.)

Probably the most blatant example of what I'm meaning is at Disneyland, where every ride has been so designed to get the maximum number of people into a queue (which might have a wait of 2 hours), for a ride that lasts about 5 minutes, tops. The galling thing is that people actually endure this.

I've yet to hear of anyone queuing to get onto a web-site, which may be quite telling....actually, I've just thought of an instance I heard about during college: If memory serves, the Victoria's Secret company held a fashion show, or something. So many people logged on that their server was overloaded. The Victoria's Secret people rose to the occasion, and the next day they'd brought in additional lines to accommodate the gawkers. (Can't imagine the queues at a live event like that....)

Fruitbat