Just Saying | Hong Kong’s queueing culture: how to waste away your life
Yonden Lhatoo marvels at people’s penchant for joining the long lines for just about anything in the city, with some appearing to actually enjoy it
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote. We’re doing the same in Hong Kong, but our yardstick is the amount of time we spend lining up for anything and everything.
If you look at past research around the world, humans in general are said to spend anywhere between six months and five years or more joining queues.
Americans in total spend 37 billion hours a year waiting in line, according to one estimate. Other research suggests the average American lifespan uses up two years in queues.
Some studies put the average Briton’s queueing total in a lifetime at around six months on average, which seems rather low, considering how it is said that a lone Englishman – or woman – waiting at a bus stop will form a queue of one.
I’m not aware of any equivalent research conducted in Hong Kong but I sat down recently with a friend who excels at maths to calculate how much of my own life I’ve wasted in queues. We worked it out to two years and three months.