What Are You Waiting For? (Rebroadcast)

Standing in line represents a particularly sloppy — and frustrating — way for supply and demand to meet. Why haven't we found a better way to get what we want? Is it possible that we secretly enjoy waiting in line? And might it even be (gulp) good for us?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  or breakfast just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile's summer sale, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. Free yourself from big wireless and switch to Mint for high-speed data and coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/freak. That's mintmobile.com/freak. Upfront

• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:56Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there, podcast listeners. Every year, we gear up to produce a great set of episodes for the fall, and we need your help with one of them. Steve Levitt and I will be recording one of our Frequently Asked Questions episodes, and we need your questions. So, ask us anything you want. Use your imagination. You can send questions to [email protected]. In the subject line, please write FAQ. If you'd prefer, you could also record your question on your smartphone and send the audio file to that same email address. In any case, please tell us your first and last name, where you live, and what you do. Thanks. Now, another thing we do every summer is give me and the Freakonomics Radio crew a little downtime.

• 3:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So today, we are bringing you one of our favorite and most popular episodes from the archive. It's called "What Are You Waiting For?" Hope you enjoy.

• 3:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are a lot of good ideas that people hate when you tell them about it.

• 3:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Steve Landsberg.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I teach economics at the University of Rochester. I write books about economics.

• 3:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Books that apply an economic treatment to topics that don't usually get the economic treatment. For instance, in his book, More Sex is Safer Sex, Landsberg argues that people who are free of sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, should be having a lot more sex, since their participation in the sex pool would diminish the overall risk of disease.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  The main theme of the book is that things work out badly when people do not feel the full consequences of their actions. And things work out better when people do feel the full consequences of their actions.

• 4:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  People who do have STDs, Landsberg argues, don't feel the full consequences of their actions.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And so people are not fully accounting for the damage that they're doing to other people when they make decisions. And likewise, when you get into a line...

• 4:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you get into a line? Like, a line at a restaurant? At a bank? What kind of damage am I doing in a line?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  When you get into a line, you're not fully accounting for the fact that you are slowing down everybody who arrives after you. Once again, you're taking an action that does not account for the costs you're imposing on other people.

• 4:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. It is not as exciting as talking about sex, but today, on Freakonomics Radio, let's talk about lines.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  It's hot. I could keel over right now.

• 5:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  How long ago did you get here?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  About, say... Three days ago. Forty minutes?

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  What are lines for, anyway, from an economic perspective?

• 5:18Speaker 04

  We use queues as a way to deal with short-term fluctuations in demand.

• 5:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can anything good come from all that waiting?

• 5:26Speaker 05

  Being patient is basically more important than having a high IQ for being successful in life.

• 5:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  And is there a better way to get what we want?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Instead of sending people to the back of the line, we send people to the front of the line.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 6:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I am not the kind of person who enjoys standing in lines. Maybe you are, I'm not. I'll do just about anything I can to avoid a line. There's one movie theater near where I live that lets you buy specific seats online so that you don't have to show up 45 minutes early to get a seat. If I feel like going to the movies, I will generally go see whatever that theater is showing, rather than fight the long lines at another theater. I will always pay extra, within reason, to buy back the time that a line would steal from me. There are, of course, different kinds of lines, some less avoidable than others. If I don't want to stand in a long line at a restaurant, I can go eat somewhere else. But if I've already bought an airline ticket and need to get through security, I can't

• 6:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  just give up. Each line comes with its own set of circumstances and stakes. I am certainly not the kind of person who would stand in line for 45 minutes in the hot sun for a slice of pizza.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  For a slice of pizza.

• 7:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Two slices of pizza. Dan, for the amount of time that my buddy and I have been waiting on this frickin' line, I'm telling you. Since I don't have the patience for that kind of line, we sent this guy.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Dan Pashman, and I host this podcast called The Sporkful, where I talk about eating and people, and people eating.

• 7:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  But not eating of people. Or have you? Have you done cannibalism?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 7:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pashman is a man of relatively simple food pleasures.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  And I'm not someone who is easily taken by trends, food trends. Like, I'm not the guy that feels the need to run out and get the cronut when everyone's going crazy for it. So I have very little patience for that. But I do, once in a while, a place will capture my imagination. And often, it's a place with a history or a story behind it.

• 7:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  A place like Defara.

• 7:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a famous, old-school pizzeria in Brooklyn.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  It's been open for over 50 years. It's been run for that entire time, basically, by one man, Dom DiMarco, who came over from Italy and opened this pizzeria. And up until old age slowed him down a little bit, he made every single pizza that came out of that place. He's still, at age 79, right now, today, makes 90% or so of the pizza that comes out of there. And anytime you see a ranking of the top pizzerias in New York, Defara is always towards the top. Everyone talks about how slow it is, how hard it is to get the pizza there. And I just sort of didn't want to be hassled. You and I were talking about this issue of waiting and waiting, and I said, maybe this is the time for me to give it a shot.

• 8:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, basically, the reason you hadn't gone to Defara in the past was because there's a long line. And the reason you went to Defara, finally, is because there is a long line.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  That's true. Yes, exactly.

• 8:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so, Dan Pashman went to Defara to get some pizza for himself and to talk to the other customers waiting online.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  It was a weekday afternoon, 90-something degrees and humid in New York City. And I should say, the neighborhood of Brooklyn this is in is in a pretty residential area. No skyscrapers, no big office buildings, and not a big lunch rush like you might find in the city center in a lot of cities. The place opens at noon. By 11:30, 11:45, there were maybe 10 or 12 people in line.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  And I'm hungry. And I have a feeling it's gonna be a long time before I eat. And at noon, the window opens. They start taking orders. They weren't letting anyone in because it was so hot and their air conditioning wasn't working right. So, everyone had to stand outside to wait.

• 9:38Speaker 07

  Three spices for Ali?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  It's not a pleasant day to be waiting outside.

• 9:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  No, it's not.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Starting to wonder if this was a good idea?

• 9:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. Definitely.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  The first thing that struck me was, you know, everyone talks about the wait at De Farah. I always assumed that there would be a crazy long line. But that's actually not what causes the long wait. You will wait in line maybe for a few minutes, five or 10 minutes. Then you place your order. The wait, the holdup, is with the actual making of the pizza. And it just moves at a snail's pace. Like, it is painstaking to just... I mean, like, the place had been open for 20 or 25 minutes, and I don't think 10 slices of pizza had come out of the window yet.

• 10:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's because this one 79-year-old guy, Dom DiMarco, is the one guy primarily making the pizzas? That's why it's so slow?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Right. Every slice of pizza, a pie comes out of the oven. He removes one slice. He puts it on the plate. He takes that handful of basil. He chops the basil by hand onto each slice individually. He grates the grana padano cheese onto the slice individually. And on one hand, I'm so enamored with this sort of painstaking work, you know, and the craftsmanship of it. On the other hand, I'm like, "Come on! Get a guy to chop all the basil first thing in the morning and just move this thing along a little bit." You know? So that was the struggle for me when I was waiting.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  Cash? It's cash only, sorry.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  It's getting close to 1 o'clock. I have not eaten a single bite of food yet. I would normally be, like, on the ground, unconscious, right now.

• 11:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk to me about the other people in line and their view of the wait.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Well, that was one of the things that I wanted to find out. This is already a $5 slice of pizza, which, even in New York City, is a lot. I'm pretty sure it's the most expensive slice in the city. And on top of that, there's a million slice places in New York. Maybe not quite as good as De Farah, but you could walk into almost any of them and get a good slice of pizza for $2. So I wanted to know how much more people would pay to not have to wait. And I started cornering people after they'd been waiting for, like, 20 minutes already in the heat, when they were at their most desperate and maybe they were already feeling a bit of a sunk cost situation. And every person I talked to said they would pay more than $5 if they could have had the pizza immediately. $7, yeah. Okay.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  What would you say if I told you you could pay $10 for a slice of De Farah's pizza, but there'd be no wait at all? I might potentially be tricked into doing it once just to have the experience, but there'd be no repeat business, that's for sure. I see. What about $12 a slice?

• 12:12Speaker 08

  I think once you get double digits, it's the cutoff.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  If I told you you could pay 12 bucks for a slice and you'd get it right now, would you do it? This establishment in a heartbeat? Yes. Yes. 15 bucks a slice? 15 dollars.

• 12:24Speaker 09

  I would do it.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  No. No, Alden says no? 10, 10 for the most. Mom?

• 12:29Speaker 09

  No, I would do it.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  20 dollars.

• 12:31Speaker 09

  I would do it. I would do it for 20.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  25?

• 12:34Speaker 09

  Hmm, I don't know about 25, 20. I mean, we've already invested quite a bit just to get here, so that would be a nice convenience. They ought to open up a chain.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  I'd pay up to 25.

• 12:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So do you really think that someone who claimed that they would spend 25 dollars for one slice of pizza to not wait for it actually would? Or was that just their radio talk talking?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that was a lot of big talk. I think you're right. But, but, but I do think that the people who said seven or eight dollars, I think that was legit. Especially, you know, you're asking them at that moment, they've already waited 20 minutes, they got another 20 or 30 minutes ahead of them, it's 97 degrees out, and they've already paid for their pizza. So if you said to them like, "Give me three more dollars right now and I'll give you your pizza immediately," I think those people are telling the truth, that they would.

• 13:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  How long you are willing to wait in a given line depends on a lot of things. How badly you want the thing at the end of the line, whether the thing you're waiting for is rare, perhaps even unique, and what you'd be doing with your time otherwise. But even if you are willing to wait, you'll have to admit, at least if you think like an economist, that a line represents a certain kind of failure, a failure of supply to seamlessly meet demand.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  There's somewhere a scarcity. Whenever you see a line, the first thing to ask is, "What's the scarcity?"

• 14:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Felix Oberholzer-G. He's an economist at Harvard Business School.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  As a consumer in a market economy, you should expect that everything happens for you instantaneously all the time. And then, when that's not true, you need to ask, "What's the constraint?" And the constraint is sometimes cost, is sometimes availability of skilled personnel, sometimes availability of Space, but there's got to be some constraint. Otherwise, we wouldn't see a line.

• 14:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  To an economist, the way to handle this constraint is to raise prices.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  But every now and then, for both for practical, but also for moral reasons, we decide that no, the price system, just jacking up prices until supply equals demand is actually not the right thing to do.

• 14:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's why he got interested in doing some research about line standing.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  So the line research was a typical example where as an economist, you you look at lines and you have a sense of how it should be done. And then almost always you see that, nah, sort of right, but not quite.

• 15:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  One problem with lines is that they're inefficient, in part because the order that you stand in line doesn't necessarily reflect how badly you want what's at the end of the line, or how much you'd be willing to pay for it. This led Oberholzer G to wonder why more people don't pay to cut in line.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  Is it that you could go to the person in front and you could offer money, but no one would ever let you in? Is it because there are moral qualms to do this? Because there's something that's perceived to be particularly fair about lines, and it's not something you do? Is it that people would not let you in? Because obviously, if you let someone cut in, you create a negative externality on everyone else in the line, because now they have to wait longer.

• 15:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  To find answers to these questions, Oberholzer G designed an experiment. Ten researchers, including himself, approached hundreds of people on lines in four locations in Philadelphia. He was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania at the time. They went to a cafeteria at Penn. They went to the Amtrak station, a food court, and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  So the experiment is really simple. We pick a line, so for instance, in a cafeteria. And the experimenter would walk up to a person who's in front of the line, say, position number two, or the third or fourth person in the line. And the experimenter would ask, can I cut in? If the person asks why, which sometimes happens. The experimenter would say, I would like to pay faster. So there's no long story about, I don't know, my mother and I have to get to her. And so there's as little information as possible.

• 16:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was one iteration of the experiment. In another, the researcher offered to pay.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  The amount varied between $0 and $10. And then we just see what happens.

• 17:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what happens?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  One of the interesting things is that, actually, people are quite nice. In about half of the cases, even if you don't offer money at all, people are willing to let someone cut in. And I think it's a sense that probably you wouldn't do this all the time. Probably it must be that you're in a particular rush, that you need to be somewhere. So all in all, even though there's the strong norm to not cut in line, if you ask nicely, most people are willing to do it.

• 17:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, a couple of things to say about that. When Oberholzer G. says there's a strong norm to not cut in line, that is true in the US and in other places, including Canada and the UK. The Brits, in fact, think of themselves as the originators of the queuing concept. Proper queue behavior is considered such an essential part of Britishness that a few years back, questions about queue behavior were nearly added to the UK's citizenship application. In any case, line standing is not a universal behavior. India, for instance, has been described as more familiar with the scrum than the line. The same goes for China and many other countries. Of course, you have to remember that lines represent more than culture.

• 18:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  They represent supply and demand. And if you live in a place with too much demand or too little supply, the value of maintaining a proper queue would seem to be secondary at best. But if you know your wait will be rewarded, and if you are accustomed to waiting in line, it wouldn't seem to be that big a deal to allow someone to cut in at least once in a while. And that's what Felix Oberholzer-G found in his experiment, even when he offered no money.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  About 45% of the people will let you cut in.

• 18:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what about with the cash offer?

• 18:51Speaker 04

  You see that the likelihood of being able to cut in increases from about 45% or so to 75% with $5 or $10.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, that makes sense, but...

• 19:04Speaker 04

  The most surprising thing, which really is both interesting practically, but theoretically speaking, is that while people are much more likely to let you cut in if you offer money, few people actually accept the monetary compensation.

• 19:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you catch that? Most people don't accept the money.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  So the typical conversation we'll get, can I cut in? Here's $5. You say, yes, of course, I'll let you cut in, but I'm not going to take your money.

• 19:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  To an economist, this does not seem like rational behavior.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Because we typically think that the price system, that the market works well for two reasons. One is prices indicate scarcity. If I offer $10, it must mean, wow, boy, I'm really in a rush. If I offer just $1, yeah, I don't know. I might want to be a little faster, but it's probably not that valuable to me. And so that part of the price system actually worked beautifully. But what's also true about the price system is that the person who gives up something that is really valuable to someone else is supposed to be compensated. That's the whole theory of trades. Make both parties better off. I get something that is very valuable to me, and in exchange, I pay $5, $10.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  But that exchange doesn't happen.

• 20:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why didn't that exchange happen? When line cutters offered money, why'd the line cuddies refuse to take it?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  I think that's the sense in which lines are systems that we often use when auctioning off goods or services to those who have the highest willingness to pay seems inappropriate for moral reasons.

• 20:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Inappropriate, at least if you cut in line once. But what if you do it repeatedly? Oberholzer G decided to go back the next day and ask the same people, if he could cut in line again for the same amount of money. People were not so friendly this time.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  It's sort of the way they tell you that not again. Don't think you can come here every day. These kinds of comments.

• 21:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which suggests perhaps that one of the social norms around line standing is that it's not cool to refuse someone who wants to cut in line until it becomes a regular thing. Because then the transaction moves from the moral realm to the financial realm. You are stealing time from me.

• 21:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Couple of months ago, I took a trip to France with my son for the European Championship soccer tournament. 24 European teams playing for the title. Since the fans of these teams identify themselves so plainly with jerseys and hats, it's a great chance to watch different nationalities queuing behavior and drinking behavior and fighting behavior and so on. But those are topics for another day. The first game my son and I went to was Germany against Poland at the Stade de France in Paris. Given the recent terrorist attacks, there was a ton of security to get in, three or four different checkpoints before you even got to your gate to enter the stadium. And then, at our gate, there's a massive line, 100 yards long, maybe 200. So we went to the back.

• 22:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  We are good obedient Americans after all. And after 15 minutes, we hadn't moved at all. And how could that be? People were getting into the stadium from our line. You could see that. But the line wasn't getting any shorter. Why? Because it was getting wider. Polish fans were walking up to the line, in groups of two or three or four, and just attaching themselves to the side of the line, like happy little barnacles, toward the front of the line, of course, not the back. They didn't look at the strangers they were joining in line. They would just look straight ahead calmly, as if they'd been standing there for an hour, had to admire their sense of cool. The German fans, meanwhile, went to the back of the line, like us, suckers,

• 22:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  because the line kept getting wider and wider and wider as more and more Poles kept stealing more and more time from the Germans and us. Now, we had gone to this match as neutrals. We were just there to see the footy. We did not have a rooting interest between these two teams. But by the time we finally got inside, just before kickoff, Believe me, we were firmly with the German supporters. As it turns out, it didn't matter, it was a 0-0 draw. But when Poland was finally eliminated from the tournament by Portugal, the eventual champion, we celebrated hard, even though Portugal was literally the last team we wanted to win the Euros. That is what a bad line-standing experience can do to a person.

• 23:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because as inefficient as a line may be, it at least nods toward a sense of fairness. Everyone waits. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what do your taste buds think of waiting in line?

• 24:00Speaker 05

  When other people were joining the line, then people reported that the smoothie tastes better.

• 24:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what's wrong with eliminating lines by just putting a price on everything?

• 24:12Speaker 04

  That's not a decision that we feel comfortable with.

• 24:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. The best investments are the ones you make in yourself, and no one knows that better than Southern New Hampshire University. With more than 200 online degree programs, no set class times, and low online tuition, Southern New Hampshire University is built to fit your life today and set you up for success tomorrow. Education is an investment. Why not make it a smart one? Apply for free at SNHU.edu/freakonomics.

• 25:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must haves like gym access or breakfast just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.

• 26:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Standing in a line isn't so bad if the line isn't too long, if it moves along, if there's not a lot of uncertainty, and if it seems relatively fair to everyone who's waiting. How often are all those criteria met in the real world? Not often enough. The science of queue management has certainly gotten better. You know that if you've ever been to a Whole Foods store in New York City where the lines are divided by color, by how much you're buying, and then the open registers are called out like bingo numbers. The gamification of line waiting, as mild as it may be, makes line waiting more bearable. But the real beauty of a Whole Foods line, at least, is that the wait simply isn't very

• 26:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  long, in part because they spend a lot of money on cashiers. But what if there was another, totally different, maybe cheaper, way to organize lines so that when you really want something, you wouldn't have to wait at all? You remember Steve Landsberg?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I teach economics at the University of Rochester. I write books about economics.

• 27:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  In his book, More Sex is Safer Sex, Landsberg describes a line-standing solution first proposed by an Israeli economist named Raphael Hassan.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Professor Hassan's wonderful idea is that instead of sending people to the back of the line, we send people to the front of the line. Each newcomer comes to the front of the line and pushes everyone else backward.

• 27:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Rather than the standard first come, first served model, this system is called last come, first served. Yes, I know, doesn't seem to make any sense at first, but bear with me. Imagine there is a water fountain, and you want a drink.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Each newcomer comes to the front of the line and pushes everyone else backward.

• 27:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, that's good for you, the newcomer, but what about everyone waiting in line?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  What that means is that if you're more than three or four places back, you have no hope of ever getting a drink because newcomers are going to arrive at some rate. There's going to be some point in the line where it's hopeless to wait for your drink, and therefore, those people will give up, and that's a good thing.

• 28:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a good thing how?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  It means the line will never be more than a few people long. The fountain still gets used because the stream of newcomers assures that, and the few people who are willing to wait in line assure that the fountain will be used even at the moments when no newcomer has just arrived. But not many people will be willing to wait in a line like that, and we want people giving up because we don't want them wasting their time in lines.

• 28:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, doesn't that just seem unfair somehow?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Well, you say it's not fair, but the number of people who get served is the same number that would have gotten served under any other system.

• 28:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it's a different set of people who get served.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, you might think, well, this way, some people never get served at all. That's true, but under the current system, some people never get served at all, namely the ones who are not willing to wait an hour. The same number of people are being denied service either way. The question is, how long are people waiting in line along the way? If we can minimize that, that would be great.

• 29:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Landsberg admits that, as appealing as this idea may be in theory, there are a lot of problems in practice.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  And the biggest one is that if we were to implement this system, you would have to have a way of preventing people from leaving the line and then re-entering at the front. It's got to be only the genuine newcomer who gets the drink, not the person who was waiting in line and got out and ran up to the front. Enforcing that, I think, would be a nightmare.

• 29:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it would be a worse nightmare if the stakes were higher than just a drink of water. There's another problem. With last come, first served, you could wait forever, which is bad news if you're really, really thirsty. Under first come, first served, everyone eventually gets to the front of the line.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Making people wait does select for people who need the help more desperately. And that is a good thing about making people wait. But you still wouldn't want to make them wait in line because there's a better way to deal with it. And the better way to deal with it is to let them pay a little extra to go into a premium queue.

• 30:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Landsberg acknowledges that a lot of people hate the idea of getting to pay your way out of waiting.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  There are a lot of good ideas that people hate when you tell them about it. So I think partly people just don't realize how well markets work in many cases. And as a result of that, they're hostile to things that they end up not being hostile to once they've seen them.

• 30:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Things like secondary markets.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Felix Oberholzer-G again.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  The role of the secondary markets is to go from the inefficient allocation to something that looks a little more efficient than what we had in the first place.

• 30:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like ticket resellers, like professional line standers who will do the waiting for you. But what feels socially acceptable changes over time and varies by place. And different people have different views of what's fair.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  And I think that the deeper question here is, what's the line that describes when we feel uncomfortable using the price system? So take organs, right? We have a line for scarce organs. And at least in the United States, we don't feel comfortable saying, well, why do we have this line? Shouldn't we just auction off a liver becomes available? That's not a decision that we feel comfortable with.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  People prefer a system in which There is a queue.

• 31:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Ayela Fishback.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  Everybody is being served based on the amount of time that they invested. Then a system of auction, a system where people are getting products or services based on how much money they have.

• 31:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fishback is a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  I study many aspects of motivation. Among them is how to get people to be more patient, how to get them to value what they're waiting for, questions about self-control, about gold pursuit, and so on.

• 32:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Fishback designed some waiting experiments. In one, she wanted to know how people's value of something they get in line is affected by how many other people are waiting behind them. So she and her colleagues set up an on-campus smoothie sample tasting study. For half the participants, two researchers stood in line behind the participant to make it seem like others were waiting. For the other half, no one stood behind the smoothie taster.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  When other people were joining the line, then people reported that the smoothie tastes better.

• 32:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which, to Fishback, showed that a line can signal value.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  In other words, once we wait for something, we value it more than if it was effortless, than if we never had to wait.

• 33:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  She realizes this notion runs contrary to the economist's notion that lines are inefficient and undesirable.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Well, yes, people don't mind standing in lines.

• 33:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Unless, of course, you're waiting not for an optional item, like a smoothie, but for necessities, like medicine, or food, or water, the way thousands of Venezuelans are currently doing.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  We have to separate products for which the need is increasing from products where the need is quite stable. So if we are talking about someone that needs to get medical care, where a long line is not good because they might get more sick. However, waiting for six months or so for a new iPhone might actually be a good idea for Apple because really the need for an iPhone does not increase over time.

• 34:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And for those things we don't urgently need, it may be that lines aren't just acceptable, they may be desirable. Moreover, Fishbeck argues, waiting can have a positive effect on our lives.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Yes, you're absolutely correct. So there is a ton of evidence connecting low patience with negative outcomes, which could be career, academic, health, financial, and so on. But there is relatively less on how to do that, how to make people more patient. And getting people to pause and wait and not act on the immediate desire is actually one way in which we can get them to be more patient in the long run. And lines might happen to do that, even though they are rarely intended to help people develop character. Or actually, they are never intended

• 35:01Speaker 05

  to help people develop their ability to wait longer.

• 35:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  A high level of patience is linked to so many successful outcomes that Fishbeck has a hard time thinking of all of them.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  Let me think of where I begin. Kids that are more patient have more friends, get better grades, get better SAT scores. When they grow up, people that are more patient are able to study, to advance their career. They are able to maintain their marriage. There are several studies that show that many problems in life, addiction, not being able to keep a job, are associated with low self-control.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Certainly, drinking, smoking are associated with low self-control. Basically, the person needs some immediate gratification and is unwilling to wait for the larger or later reward, which is to be healthy in the long run. So I'm not saying that standing in lines is going to be the only way or the main way to improve people's patience. But certainly, being patient.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Is a key to being successful. There was a lot of research on that. The research on self-control and how that basically more important than having a high IQ for being successful in life.

• 36:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is bad news for someone like me, since I am so impatient, since I get so irritated by Polish soccer fans cutting in line, and since I would never, ever wait in a long line in the hot summer sun just to get a slice of Brooklyn pizza like Dan Pashman would.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Anytime you see a ranking of the top pizzerias in New York, DeFar is always towards the top. I always felt like that was something that I wanted to experience.

• 37:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you got there a half hour before it opened. The window opens at noon. You place your order, you said, within 10 or 15 minutes. And then you finally ate at about, what, 12:45 or so?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say it was a 45-minute wait for our pizza.

• 37:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'll tell you what I would have done. Here's how you and I are different. I never would have gone to a place with a line. I respect what you do. I respect it. Don't get me wrong. I just couldn't have done it. So I really, I respect your patience, but tell me this, was it worth it?

• 37:31Speaker 03

  I gotta say, the regular slice is very good, but it's actually the square slice, the Sicilian slice, that is completely rocking my world. And you just, just listen to what it sounds like when you bite into this pizza.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  That crunch of the crust, holy cow.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  I'm glad I did it. The pizza was really delicious. I would go again, but I wouldn't go 25 more times. And I would only go with the right expectations.

• 38:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, the first of a three-part series that we're calling Bad Medicine. Because medicine, as wonderful and life-saving as it can be, has also been a house of horrors.

• 38:31Speaker 10

  The practices that, at some point in history, people thought were actually medically legitimate included drilling holes into people's skulls, lobotomies, the practice of bloodletting, things like mercury, which we know are downright toxic.

• 38:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  But that kind of stuff is all ancient history, right?

• 38:53Speaker 11

  It is patently obvious to me that future generations will look at what we're doing today and ask themselves, what was grandpa thinking?

• 39:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  You'll hear how a lot of medical research excludes at least half the population.

• 39:11Speaker 12

  They only studied the efficacy on males, had no females in that efficacy study.

• 39:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you'll hear about the rise of evidence-based medicine.

• 39:20Speaker 10

  And I think the strength of the field is that it's able to question itself and try to produce better evidence.

• 39:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 39:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Caitlin Pierce. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. Thanks to Dan Pashman of the Sporkful Podcast and his producer, Anne Sannie, for bringing us this idea and for waiting in line for DeFara Pizza. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check out our archive at Freakonomics.com, where you can stream or download every episode we've ever made, or you can read the transcripts and find links to the underlying research. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email

• 40:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  at [email protected]. And don't forget to send me and Levitt your questions for our next Frequently Asked Questions episode. Thanks.

• 40:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data, so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place, and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.

• 41:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 41:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  time worrying about money and more on what matters. Sign up for US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings today at usbank.com/smartly. Member FDIC. Copyright 2026 US Bank.

• 42:11Speaker 13

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