\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure what else we can do to be honest,\u201d Paul Loebenberg said, of the people lined up at his bar. \u201cMaybe there\u2019s something I\u2019ve missed, but we\u2019ve tried everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
To anybody who frequents pubs and dislikes feeling as if they are waiting at a bank, Loebenberg\u2019s exasperation is all too familiar.<\/p>\n
Pubs, bars, taprooms and watering holes of all descriptions are a cornerstone of British culture, where, for as long people have been able to buy ale, an unspoken system has been in place: come to the bar and a bartender will serve you at their leisure.<\/p>\n
This system, however, has seemingly been upended by a new way of ordering drinks.<\/p>\n
Landlords around the country have noticed the rise of queueing at pubs, with a growing number of people \u2013 usually a younger cohort \u2013 electing to wait in a single file line, standing one behind the other, before being called forward to order as if going through border control.<\/p>\n
<\/span>A dying system? Lateral bar crowding has been a mainstay of the UK pub for as long as anyone can remember.<\/span> Photograph: David Gee 5\/Alamy<\/p>\n At Wolfpack, a taproom in north-west London, run by the brewing company of the same name for whom Loebenberg is the managing director, the problem has come from nowhere but is hurting business and the experience of his customers.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like the one person did it once and since then everyone has followed like lemmings, they all just copy each other\u2019s behaviour,\u201d said Loebenberg. Staff at Wolfpack have had to begin walking over from behind the taps to free customers from the queue and send them to the bar to get served.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve trained our guys to say: \u2018Please come forward, don\u2019t queue,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we could figure out why, then we would find a remedy. But there\u2019s no rhyme and reason.\u201d<\/p>\n Jess Riley, a manager at Wylam Brewery, a large bar and events space in Newcastle, believes that the pub queue epidemic began around the same time that a different outbreak spread across Britain.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it was the pandemic,\u201d said Riley. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a thing before 2020, and then all of a sudden people really started to like a single-file line after Covid. I know we\u2019re British and we like a queue, but it\u2019s ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n Riley says that despite Wylam having multiple bars to get served from, with the largest measuring over 20ft (6 metres) in length, there are still customers who insist on forming an orderly queue, no matter how much it annoys the bar staff, with lines of customers sometimes \u201csnaking around the building\u201d owing to people refusing to spread across the available space.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re a big place with massive bars, but some people just refuse to stop queueing,\u201d said Riley.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve argued with customers who queue before because I serve people who come to the bar and they\u2019ve said it\u2019s unfair, and I just said: \u2018The whole bar is empty, why are you standing there when there\u2019s all this space.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>It may be that the queue to pay respects to Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 changed people\u2019s attitudes to queueing.<\/span> Photograph: Emilio Morenatti\/AP<\/p>\n According to John Drury, a professor of psychology at the University of Sussex, people\u2019s attitudes around public activities such as going for drinks and attending music and sports events have changed since the pandemic, sometimes negatively.<\/p>\n \u201cFor people who work in these industries, when we\u2019ve spoken to them, a lot say that behaviour has gotten worse post-pandemic,\u201d said Drury.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say it has become normalised, and when you ask the general public, their response is more mixed, because not all of them realise that their behaviour has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n Drury, who is himself a supporter of the queueing system at pubs, believes that it adds an element of fairness that is not found when \u201ccrushing around the bar\u201d.<\/p>\n He specialises in the behaviour of crowds and was a consultant for the planning of the queue to pay respects to Queen Elizabeth II after her death in 2022. He believes that despite the fact queueing at the bar is at times illogical, social pressure means that it is likely to persist.<\/p>\n \u201cIts a new norm and norms are neither rational nor irrational. A norm means not only something that people generally do, it also means something that people in your group think is the right thing to do, so if you resist it, you are going to be regarded as a deviant, a troublemaker, a pain.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd people don\u2019t want to be put in that position,\u201d said Drury, adding that even though data shows that the amount of time people wait when queueing rarely goes down, \u201cpeople may still prefer it, knowing they\u2019re waiting just as long as the person in front of them\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI\u2019m not sure what else we can do to be honest,\u201d Paul Loebenberg said, of the people lined up at his bar. \u201cMaybe there\u2019s something I\u2019ve missed, but we\u2019ve tried everything.\u201d To anybody who frequents pubs and dislikes feeling as if they are waiting at a bank, Loebenberg\u2019s exasperation is all too familiar. Pubs, bars,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[22721,22720,16684,22723,22719,313,11865,22722],"class_list":{"0":"post-43441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-bemused","9":"tag-publicans","10":"tag-pubs","11":"tag-queues","12":"tag-ridiculous","13":"tag-rise","14":"tag-served","15":"tag-singlefile"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/43442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}