No-one relishes the moment. You are stuck at the back of a queue and as those in other lines sail past and get served, the time to decide arrives. Do you hold your nerve and stay put, switch to another line in the hope it moves faster, or give up altogether?

The pressing question has now been tackled by research at Harvard Business School. It found that when a person finds themselves at the end of a queue, they can make decisions that swiftly backfire. And it is all down to our aversion to being last.



Those in a particular place in a queue were four times more likely to quit when there was no-one else behind them, and twice as likely to switch to another queue, even though doing so meant they typically waited even longer to get served, researchers found.



“It’s nuts because the number of people behind you has nothing to do with how long you are going to wait, but it shapes our behaviour,” said Ryan Buell, an expert in service management who led the research. “If we are in last place, we are almost 20% less satisfied than if someone is behind us.”



Buell looked into consumer queueing behaviour after working with economists on what is know as “last place aversion”, the discomfort people feel when they know they earn less than others, or consider themselves at the bottom of the social pile for some other reason. While people’s salaries are not always apparent, whoever is last in a queue is clear to all.



Buell began by observing people at a multi-checkout grocery store and then set up an online survey that doubled as a behavioural study. People who took part in the survey were told it would take about five minutes. In reality, it took only a minute, but when participants logged in for the survey, they were forced to wait in a virtual queue displayed on the screen. They started at the back and could wait, switch to a second queue, or choose to leave.



About one in five people grew impatient at the back of the queue and switched to the other line in the hope of speeding things up. But on average, those who switched waited 10% longer than if they had stayed put. Those who switched twice fared even worse and ended up waiting 67% longer than if they had never moved.



“When we join a queue, we tend to make the most rational choice we can, which usually means joining the shortest queue. But if we see a line moving faster, we might switch without having enough extra information, and we can often get it wrong,” said Buell.



On the back of his study, Buell says people should think hard about switching queues when they are last in line. “Try to separate out if the other queue is really moving faster, or if you just don’t feel good about being at the back,” he said. Another strategy is to strike up conversation with the person in front which, if nothing else, passes the time until someone else joins behind you. Failing that, he said, simply don’t look back.



But it is organisations that stand to benefit the most from the research. The service industry focuses its attention on the person at the front of the queue, but this ignores the fact that the most painful place to be is at the back, Buell said. One solution is to start serving people from the moment they join a queue, for example, by taking their coffee order.

There are other tricks companies could play. Instead of telling someone on hold that they are the 5th caller out of five, a call centre could hide the fact that they are last, and refer to them simply as caller five until the queue grows behind them. “Knowing you are not in last place makes you less likely to give up,” Buell said.



In an unpublished working paper on the research, Buell notes that people tend to feel most unhappy at the back of a queue for the first 10 seconds or so, after which the misery subsides. “Remember that the person in front of you was last until you arrived, so someone will show up if you hang around long enough,” he said.

