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C1 English Reading Test
Read the text about professional queuers and answer questions 1–7. Choose the correct option or complete the gap.
Paid to wait: The professional queuers
You’ve been outside a restaurant for ninety minutes. Your feet hurt, you’re hungry, and the person ahead has brought a camping chair. Sensible, you think. Then someone arrives, pays him and takes his place. The chair folds up. Its owner leaves. You mutter something in disbelief.
Professional queuers, also known as ‘line sitters’, sell their patience by the hour. They wait for theatre tickets, restaurant tables and products that people could probably survive without owning. The customer turns up near the front and swaps places with them. Some people climb the career ladder; others have discovered that a pavement will do.
Before rolling our eyes, we should acknowledge that the idea makes sense. Given that we already pay strangers to walk our dogs and assemble our furniture, hiring someone to endure a queue hardly represents the collapse of civilisation. If you can afford it, why sacrifice your Saturday? Someone is willing to do the waiting, and you have better things to do. Or things you’d rather do, anyway.
It’s harder to be so reasonable when you’ve been standing behind the hired queuer all morning. You’ve arranged your day around getting there early, and then his customer strolls up with a coffee, ready to take over. You might well object on the grounds that everyone else has had to wait in person. Try explaining that without sounding jealous—or bitter about your missed breakfast.
The service’s defenders maintain that you haven’t lost anything. One person leaves, another takes his place: you’ll get through the door at exactly the same time. I don’t take issue with that. But imagine chatting to the queuer for an hour, complaining together about the slow service, only to discover he’s being paid for the pleasure. You might feel a bit of a fool. There you were, thinking you were all in the same boat.
Then again, who can afford to spend a weekday morning in a queue? Someone has to collect the children from school, and asking your boss for three hours off to buy theatre tickets may not go down terribly well. A substitute could come in handy. Meanwhile, a person with plenty of money and no particular commitments can wait as long as they like. That rather calls into question the idea that making everyone turn up in person is fair, given that not everyone has the same freedom to do so.
There are limits to this defence. We should draw a distinction between outsourcing a wait for an expensive pastry and buying access to an essential service. And the line sitter deserves more attention than these arguments usually allow. Sitting outdoors sounds easy until it rains, your phone dies and you need a toilet. It’s paid work, albeit without much of what makes a workplace bearable.
As for the rest of us, perhaps we could occasionally question what we’re waiting for. A place becomes fashionable; photographs of its queue circulate; more people arrive, only to spend their afternoon looking at somebody’s backpack. At that point, the queue is doing a remarkable amount of the marketing.
I wouldn’t ban line sitters. Nor would I hire one for lunch—if a restaurant requires that much advance suffering, I’ll eat somewhere else. But I can hardly blame the person with the camping chair. Of everyone on that pavement, at least he knows what his time is worth.
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