Pub Queues

During the Covid pandemic the hospitality industry was subject to a series of idiotic nonsensical restrictions that at the time the majority of politicians, journalists, commentators and the public vigorously supported. I would credit most of the restrictions to be well intentioned but ultimately governed by ignorance and fear with a significant degree of group think. Not mixing, touching or breathing on each other being a governing principle.

Expressing scepticism to the obviously more ridiculous elements would be met with the view that you were accepting the death of the vulnerable just to get a pint or make a quid you disgraceful person you. Nevertheless I stuck to it. At the time I was the main support for elderly parents and fully understand the caution and the anger towards the incautious that ultimately stiffed the likes of Boris Johnson.

A feature of the era was people keeping their distance from each other. People swerved each other when passing in the street. Shops had formal queues with floor markings governing the distance people ought to stand from each other.

When pubs reopened, they suffered a myriad of operational requirements. Perspex barriers, the requirement to eat a scotch egg, recording your visit and contact details, and of course the queuing systems familiar to other parts of retail.

A feature of this time which is no longer enforced but customers seem to have arbitrary hung on to is queuing. It is common now to see long queues of people in a pub, all patiently waiting their turn. I wish they had kept the perspex, myself.

This seems to appal longer standing pub goers who appear to retain a firm preference for the traditional pub ordering system. For those unfamiliar this involved taking a place at the bar and either being served in order as the bar tender noted the order of those arrived or a bit of a scrum and survival of the fittest depending on the establishment. At best it was akin to the type of queue you find in a barbers shop, at worst a chaotic game where being tall, making eye contact and shouting saw you victorious over the more timid.


Those appalled include amusing twitter account dedicated to this cause, Adrian Chiles and any number of articles. Many of which seem to consider this a generational phenomenon. Somehow the young don’t understand the rules of the game the old timers lived with. I don’t accept this. Pub queues seem multi generational in my observation. Generational divides are a popular trope but this isn’t one.

I have little skin in this game. I have long preferred the table service of European bars, dislike busy pubs and tend to use pubs that tick over but allow for a stroll to the bar and immediate service. I am a big fan of the Wetherspoons app and consider it one of the great hospitality improvements of the age. Tradition should be no barrier to innovation in my humble opinion.

I have to laugh though. Not at the queues. At those that grumble about them. A queue is fair. It affords no advantage to the big and pushy. It offers the small and timid their turn to get a drink. What’s so great about a scrum? Bad about a queue?

The changing nature of pubs and their offer should in my view have led to the conclusion that bar service isn’t suitable for all offers. A pub led with food service and serving a fair number of long complicated to assemble drinks, why have bar service? Table service works better, ffs. An old man pub with bar staff pulling pints in the order of who works in the door, stick with bar service.

But I still laugh at the grumblers and ponder how this feature of Covid has maintained. We appear to have dropped the Covid restrictions and when you see someone in a mask, it’s unusual. For this to have been maintained, it must have utility. People must like it. Or else it would have been dropped. We have not all stuck with eating scotch eggs with our pints. As nice as a scotch egg is, we dropped that.

So the grumblers must be a noisy minority with a quiet majority liking that and sticking with it and maintaining enough social pressure to keep it. Social media is full of people seeing queues and ignoring them and getting 3 of their followers to click like. I suspect the whole pub considers them twats, so it depends, I guess, what level of social approval you seek.

I have a theory. It should not surprise you. I have a lot of theories. Many of my theories connect dots that otherwise are unrelated. Not all are correct. They are ideas caused I think by drinking far more whisky than beer to maintain a physique. It could be addling my brain. I grant the possibility.

My theory is this. The country is undergoing considerable noticeable social change as a direct result of mass immigration. A difficult and divisive subject prone to accusations of racism if you dare suggest it isn’t entirely an untrammeled good. That it is a change with benefits and costs and a free democracy ought to be free to acknowledge both.

Social progressive types like to think immigration is an untrammelled good and point to the benefits and cultural delights immigrants bring whilst turning a blind eye to some of the costs, especially when those costs fall on others or reveal not all global cultures have common shared values. More conservatively minded people uncomfortable at social change tend to diminish the benefits and point out the costs, the crime, the changes in normal social behaviour that are apparent.

One feature that is disappearing from society is queueing. Public transport is a scrum. It wasn’t always. Many aspects of our community now more closely resemble social norms seen in other countries than were the norm earlier in my lifetime.

Pubs remain a cultural anglicised environment. Whilst welcoming to all, norms and rules exist in pubs that can be comforting. Of course the comforting anglicised norms of the pub change, in this case to embrace a comforting tradition formerly alien to it. I’m not claiming pubs are white British enclaves of Englishness but I am claiming they have a culture that requires the customers to adapt to it. So all that drink in the pub, of whatever colour, religion or origin, have accepted the anglicised norms and rules of pubs. And in a world where queuing is disappearing from other aspects of life, where many know this to be a degrading of public life and not an improvement, putting queuing in pubs is comforting. A little bit of civilisation preserved. A pub queue comforts those in it and just because you do not understand the appeal, your scorn will not destroy it.

It’s only a theory. As to why a majority like it. I know why a minority dislike it. Most will claim they dislike the loss of a tradition, in reality it is the loss of an advantage they previously enjoyed. But pub queues are staying. Your choice is to join it, download the app, or ignore it and barge to the bar and be considered a twat.