A policy group has warned of “two-tier queueing” after being asked to wait the same amount of time as everyone else, describing the experience as “deeply unsettling” and “not what queues were designed for”.
The complaint arose after the group attended an event advertised as first come, first served. Witnesses said the organisation appeared confident that its arrival would be recognised as exceptional, but began to show visible concern when the queue continued to behave as a queue.
“We were told to join the line,” said one representative, speaking from a position of moral injury between a parent with a pram and a man quietly holding a sandwich. “And we did. But we then noticed the line was moving according to time, not importance.”
The group said the incident demonstrates a broader shift in society away from “fairness” and towards “the idea that rules might apply consistently”. In a statement, it called for urgent reform, including a new system in which queues are organised by confidence, volume and how strongly a person feels that they were “here first in spirit”.
Other people in the queue were unimpressed. “It’s just a queue,” said one attendee, who declined to publish a manifesto about it. Another said they were sympathetic to the representative’s struggle, noting that it is difficult to adapt to a world where priority is not automatically granted to those who talk about priority the most.
Event staff said the organisation was eventually served and received exactly what it asked for, though it later complained that the item was “less free” than expected on the grounds that it had been obtained through the humiliating process of waiting.
The group confirmed it is now drafting a report urging institutions nationwide to restore “common sense queuing”, a system it described as “the kind where you can tell who should be at the front by looking”.
