Single-file lines that snake around–like at airports or banks–haven’t always been the way people queued up. According to “Mr. Next,” Ian Parker’s fun 2003 “Talk” piece in the New Yorker, the practice only began in America in the 1980s. It seems so simple and obvious, but someone had to come up with it. An except:

“The history of American queuing has a simple outline. First there were hordes with sticks, then there were lines, and then, in the early nineteen-eighties, thanks in part to visionary thinking at the Columbus, Ohio, headquarters of Wendy’s (and initiatives at American Airlines and Chemical Bank, among others), customers began to be asked to form lines that the trade usually describes as ‘serpentine’: they snaked back on themselves, and the person at the head of the snake stepped up to the next available cashier or teller. This system was plainly fairer: no one who arrived after you would be served before you. It removed most fear and doubt from the queue calculus, leaving only impatience and anger; and in almost every place where it could be adopted it was.”

Another Ian Parker post:

• Brian MacKinnon was not your typical teenager. (1997)