On a mother-daughter trip to Paris, my daughter and I ended up in the checkout line at Sephora on the Champs-Élysées.
It was long.
Neither of us noticed.
The whole line was flanked by tiny minis, sorted by color, and she spent the wait building a little rainbow of things she suddenly couldn't live without. By the time we reached the register, it hadn't felt like waiting at all.
That wasn't luck.
According to the International Association of Department Stores, when Sephora renovated that flagship, it moved checkout into a single queue and optimized its display of minis and impulse products specifically for the people waiting in it.
Someone sat down and designed that wait.
And it's stuck with me ever since.
Retail spent the last decade trying to remove every second of waiting from the store. I think we removed the wrong thing. The problem was never the wait. It was empty waiting.
The Line Nobody Minds
Think about the longest line you've ever stood in on purpose. For a lot of us, it's at Disney. An hour for a ride that lasts four minutes, and somehow it's still one of the best days of the year.
That isn't an accident either. At Disney, the story of a ride starts the moment you step into the queue, not when you board. The line is laid out so you can't see how many people are ahead of you, which takes away the urge to give up. And the posted wait time tends to run long, so when a 60-minute line moves faster, it feels like you won something. At Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, the queue is considered part of the attraction itself.
Disney never got rid of the wait.
It made the wait part of the ride.
The problem was never the wait.
It was empty waiting.
Gen Z Is Lining Up on Purpose
Here's what surprised me. The generation that grew up with one-click everything is choosing the line.
In early November, YPulse reported that waiting in line has become a pastime, or at least content, for Gen Z, who will line up for hours at pop-ups, viral food spots and product drops. There's even a name for it. Some Gen Zs call it “friction-maxxing,” which The Globe and Mail describes as a nostalgic choice to accept a little inconvenience in exchange for a reward instead of instant gratification.
And it isn't just a TikTok thing. In a survey of more than 2,000 Gen Z shoppers, over three in five said they'd happily wait 15 minutes or more for something they really wanted, and many said the effort made the experience feel more valuable. The researchers' takeaway could have been this post's thesis: waiting is no longer the friction point retailers have worked so hard to remove.
This is the same generation handing its deal-hunting to AI.
They aren't patient by default.
They're choosing where their patience goes.
Not All Waiting Is the Same
To be fair, nobody is nostalgic for a slow register. There are really two kinds of lines in a store.
The line to get in is anticipation. You chose it. You're excited. That one you build up.
The line to pay is friction. You're done, your arms are full, you want to go home. That one you fill.
Back in 1985, David Maister wrote a short paper on the psychology of waiting lines that I still think about. Occupied time feels shorter than empty time. Uncertain waits feel longer than known ones. Waiting alone feels longer than waiting together. Sephora's minis and Disney's switchbacks are those ideas, built.
How to Make a Wait Worth It
Over the next few weeks, almost every store will have a line. The question is what it feels like to stand in yours. If I were walking a client's store this month, here's where I'd start.
Give people something to discover. Not a wall of ads. A reason to look closer, the way those minis turned a checkout line into a treasure hunt.
Let them feel progress. Hide the full length if it's daunting, but tell people roughly how long they'll be there, and let the wait come in under the estimate.
Make the line a place, not a hallway. Somewhere you can stand with your friends, talk to someone who knows the product, or try something you couldn't get from a delivery. The best stores design for time spent, not only time saved.