Queuing in France

Queue for the Tignes furnicular

As much as the Brits are known for queuing, other European cultures are known for anti-queuing. I grew up in Australia where we seemed to find a happy medium. At the bus stop, you just hang around, and when a bus pulls up, nobody cares who should get on first. We just get on the bus. In London, I noticed the opposite: you queue at the bus stop, even if it means a line that gets in the way of others. It’s only fair, apparently, so that the people who have waited longest get on the bus for sure, while the late-comers may have to wait for the next bus. Of course, I didn’t realise this straight away, and I regularly stood at the bus stop wondering why people were staring at me. Nobody ever said anything, but I learnt over time, and I soon became the staring queuer, angered when another new-comer didn’t know the rules, yet too assimilated with the locals to actually speak out.

In the French Alps, however, it’s everyone for themselves. I’ve seen it in action, but I hadn’t ever thought about it until I got this e-mail from a blog reader called Jen. She said:

I’ve noticed that the French are amazingly patient and are able to wait hours for meals/rides/appointments but cannot seem to wait at all in a line. My 5 year old has been trampled repeatedly by adults in lift lines of less than 10 people! At the airport check in, even if there isn’t a crowd, everyone feels compelled to sneak ahead. I don’t get it!

Jen is spot-on with her observations! I’ve often been annoyed when waiting for locals to chat for anything up to ten minutes while I wait just to ask for a postage stamp, or the classic time at the supermarket when the couple in front of me didn’t have enough money to cover their purchase, so one left—I presumed to get to the bank machine around the corner—and after fifteen minutes, his partner revealed she had gone home to get more money. Home!

Patience is required often in France, but as Jen says, lift queues in ski resorts are like some sort of post-Christmas stock-take sale, with skiers and snowboarders pushing forward and sliding on the skis of those in front of them. Even when halted by a ski pole stuck between their skis, or a snowboarder’s foot stamping down near or on their equipment, the queue-jumpers know it’s just a temporary barrier that they see as a challenge to overtake before their queuing is over. And as Jen says, even a five-year-old is likely to get trampled during such a challenge.

But Jen, I have news for you: I have seen a perfectly orderly, single-file queue for a drag lift here in France. Yes, honestly. My French friend was just as surprised as I was, and the Brit in front of us was so excited at seeing such a thing for the first time in the “twenty years I’ve been coming here” that he felt the need to tell us so. None of us are sure why this rare phenomenon happened during a peak tourist time (Christmas), especially since the queue area was wide and unused. We wondered if they were all English tourists, but the French voices in front of us disproved that theory. To this day, it’s a mystery, and one that’s likely to remain unsolved.

About

I'm a technical author, journalist and writer from Australia who has been living in Europe since 2000 and exploring the world from there. My passions are writing, snow sports and travel.

6 Comments on “Queuing in France

  1. First.. can I just say that I LOVE LOVE LOVE the fact that when a post has no comments, your blog says “please pop the comment cherry”. That is HYSTERICAL!!

    Now – on to the lines. We Americans take our lines seriously (at least in FL and Northern VA where I’ve lived). We form a line for everything and that line better keep moving. If you are zoning out and don’t see that the line has moved up.. you WILL get hollered at. I’ve seen parents picking up their kids from school get in fights while waiting in car-rider line. Like I said.. we take our lines seriously here.. and we don’t tolerate cutters. 🙂

    I’ve really been enjoying your blog. It is great to have a little “window” into another culture. Thanks!

  2. I think it’s a regional thing here in America, actually. I was very accustomed to patient lines when growing up in Colorado and it never occurred to me that everywhere else didn’t do the same. But when I moved to Texas, BOY did it change! Here it’s very much like you describe in France. It’s a free-for-all. They just group together and then fight for the position at the front. I’ve slowly gotten used to it, but it’s still very odd to me.

    Cathy

  3. So true – I didn’t realize how much I actually love our orderly lines until I started spending a lot of time in France. I have to tell myself over and over – it’s not personal, they aren’t being rude, it’s just cultural… but still sometimes it just drives me nuts!

  4. It’s funny here in the States because I think it varies on which region, or even what part of the state.

    I grew up as an Ohio kid and let me say how things are different from Cleveland up in the northeast to even here three hours away in Dayton. I found that Clevelanders were more apt to be impatient and cut one another in line. While that happens here sometimes in Dayton, I don’t find it happening nearly as much.

  5. Definitely a regional thing. In Montreal, it seems that the tails of lines are always perfectly formed (though if the person ahead of you moves forward and you don’t, people glare, similar to what Kat said), and once you actually get to the front, people get excited and start to clump, resulting in way too many “sorry”s and “after you”s.