I don’t think we Americans are bad at it, but I don’t think we’ve got anything on the English or the Japanese (bonus, and pardon the links to the bad place), not enough to consider it a markable trait of ours. I suspect we’re probably middle to high-middle in queuing globally, although I won’t claim to be the most world-traveled or knowledgeable person.
Yeah, my experience is primarily from noticing how prevalent line-skipping was in Germany in my childhood compared to the US. As I said, people do it, but it’s VERY frowned upon.
As a Brit I am DEEPLY offended… It’s beans ON toast! Beans and toast does not highlight the important fact that the beans must be placed on top of the toast. Do you expect me to separate my “beans and toast”… Or put toast on beans like some hooligan!!!
I live in America. Where does the notion that Americans don’t queue come from? For most things where people are served one at a time and more than one person wants to be served, people queue.
It comes from living in America and being around and previously working at places that may have a system where lining up would work well. Granted, the area I’m at has a large tourist population but that are mostly all Americans from out of state. It’s anecdotal evidence. Maybe just my city or something.
@yamapikariya I feel like there's a distinction to be made between Americans _visiting _a city and the people that live there.
For instance, when I lived in the SF Bay Area, ques for services locals used were efficient and well-ordered unless jackass tourists were involved. IIRC (it's been a while), everyone standing on the BART escalators would be on the left, leaving the right half of the escalator for people in a hurry to walk up or down the stairs. But mix in a few American tourists and it was just willy nilly people everywhere.
7:00 AM? All locals, everything is good. 1:00 PM? Good fucking luck.
Tourists also don't seem to understand or CARE that the city they're visiting has to run somehow, and they meander around on the sidewalks oblivious to everyone else like they're in a theme park.
TL;DR - - Americans know how to queue, they just don't do very well when they're out of their element in unfamiliar places.
Honestly I’ve met some British tourists who didn’t queue very well on vacation either. There are just so many more Americans tourists in many places that we overwhelm many other countries asshole tourists.
I’m not trying to say Americans aren’t shitty tourists we are most definitely shitty tourists.
In fairness, we queue when bollards are put up, maybe even based on paint on the ground. It must be declared though
We lack the natural instinct to queue though. If you have an ingress or ticket booth, lacking direction, we form a mob that filters in rather than a queue. At best, we might queue at a store opening if there’s many hours to wait
That’s my experience, too, and we got it from the British. Sure, there are line-skipping jerks, but they’re socially frowned upon. Compare this to somewhere like Germany where people were constantly skipping lines and nobody seemed to care.
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