Having spent my younger life in Florence, I always had an interest in the logic of lines. At first, and like most tourists, I treated queues as outsourced discernment: after all, so many strangers could not all be wrong.
Now, walking through Bologna as a tourist myself, I keep catching the heuristic at work and noticing how misleading it becomes in touristic towns. In a small town the assumption mostly holds, because repeat customers discipline the market, and the local who returns weekly to the same café will not keep returning if the espresso is ‘di merda.’
Tourist cities break that discipline. The customer base turns over constantly, so tomorrow’s queue is replenished not by yesterday’s satisfied diners but by a fresh supply of ignorant visitors, each running the same heuristic and assuming there must be a reason all these people are here. There are reasons, but nothing related to what happens in the kitchen.
The line stops selecting for quality and starts reproducing attention, and the real cost is opportunity, since three streets over there is always a better alternative.