Cafes should have 2 lines...

[Mysterian]

...one for people like me who want sensible drinks like a cup of tea, and one for those who want freaky complicated things requiring bizarre steampunk looking machinery that take as much as 45 minutes to prepare. Take your order for a wombat milk frappy-mocha foam with cream and splash of smugness syrup and get out my way.
2 lines. One with a sign saying "Normal" above it and one saying "Can't Understand Normal Tea Stuff" overhead.
I sometimes have a hot chocolate, but without the la-di-da stuff like cream and chocolate powder. Like John Wayne or Jesus would have had.

I have to say I do often miss Italian cafes where everyone has basically the same order. Espresso. Or maybe capuccino before mid morning. It's considered weird to order one later in the day. No faffing about with all these add ons and special orders. I saw a Youtube video once where someone timed the whole experience, from walking in the door, ordering, knocking back the espresso, paying and walking back out the door, at under two minutes. But coffee culture is very different here.

I literally spat my tea out at the acronym for the second line. Pure genius.
I feel this in my soul. I went in for a builders tea yesterday and had to wait behind someone ordering an 'iced-decaf-oat-latte-with-extra-syrup-and-dusting-of-unicorn-farts'. By the time the 'barista' (it’s a coffee shop, not an opera house) had finished the latte art, I’d aged three years and my parking was about to expire.
Since it’s New Year’s Eve, I imagine the 'smugness syrup' is in high demand today. Everyone’s out with their 'New Year, New Me' energy, ordering green tea matchas that look like pond water.
Can we also have a third line for people who have their loyalty app ready to scan and don't spend 5 minutes digging through a Mary Poppins bag for their purse only after the total is announced?
Enjoy your John Wayne hot chocolate. No 'la-di-da' bits allowed! 😂

A lot of this comes from a lack of what I call "queue behind awareness". I seem to have a knack of bigger queue in front of me and none behind, not sure why.

Anyway, if there's a queue behind I believe that all choices should be made, or questions rehearsed, and money should be mobilised ahead of getting served. A queue in front also serves a function of giving time for consideration. If there's no queue behind then that's a licence to open a conversation with the server, either asking for advice on the purchase, or otherwise.

I'm somewhere in the middle wanting a bog standard flat white or normal latte. Whereas the person in front of me always wants a family selection of some kind of arty farty sickly frappe something or other.
You either like coffee or you don't. I've never really understood why people feel the need to have flavourings/sweeteners. Completely spoils the coffee but each to the their own.
Unfortunately these differing opinions slows my day down.

This need has already been met! https://knoops.com/uk?srsltid=AfmBOoqE6Ebglvodb5eKvk_kqjgpog_CRwLzAMeyUfbRsGIgbZg7fbs

fantastic hot chocolate but they take an absolute age about it. Each drink separately handcrafted…

I’m honestly not that fussy when it comes to coffee. Years of drinking any old coffee from a filter jug at work have apparently made me unable to tell the difference between good and bad coffee. I don’t drink much of it but as long as it isn’t instant I’ll probably drink it.

YES! Queue queue queue queue queue. Few of us here are Americans.

Same with GP surgeries. One line is the young who need a 5 min chat and a quick examination, the other is the elderly with a rucksack full of medications and multiple bandages to remove.

Separate lines definitely. And, as well as the "boutique" coffee buyer, the person in front of you who suddenly whips out a post-it note with the order for the 6 others on their team needs to queue there too.

Goodness, do you have any other White Supremacist beverage heroes or is it just John Wayne? Not sure Jesus is a good bedfellow for him, although I guess he was the forgiving kind…

In the summer DH and I had just got back to our car after a nice, long walk and there was one of those specially adapted small vans that serve coffees parked nearby. The sort where basically the whole back of the van is a coffee machine.

Anyway there appeared to be just one woman about to be served, so no long queue, so DH and I decided to go get a drink. However, not only was she having some time-consuming concoction but it soon transpired that she was there with her friend and all their combined kids who ran over once she was being served so they could then decide what they would like. Nearly all the choices seemed to involve some sort of syrup which she kept in a different part of the van.

DH muttered to me "Let's just leave it", but I thought that it would look rude and impatient because by that stage it was obvious we were in the queue. Bleeding frustrating though.

45 minutes to make a drink, not sure that’s likely!

Everywhere should have two lines - one for people who’s first day on earth is today, the other for normal people

I'm fairly sure Jesus had hot chocolate with cream on top... It says in the bible

lol, so bizarre cleaning the nozzle and making sure it’s hygienic ey 😂. Ya’ll need a party tonight on this thread, loosen up

How about a 1 minute queue? If your order will take less than 1 minute (assuming staff engagement), you join that queue. If your order takes longer but you joined that queue, you pay double (or, better, you pay for the person behind).

Airports I would have a loyalty scheme. You get a stamp on your card for every time you are well organised, when you have 4 stamps you get to go to a special area for organised people.
Or as they have it some places, everyone is sidelined into a "get organised" area and when you are ready, you take your position in the queue rather than approaching the security area and then deciding you need to take off all your clothes. The organised could just bypass that area.

Subway, well, I'm a bit scared of Subway.

This is very true but some of us hate coffee but still like cafes (cause it’s somewhere to socialise with someone and also: cake).

Oh Yes! I think it's another form of complete lack of awareness. Surely it's common sense that if you're in a huge queue, you try to be served as quickly as possible and not faff around chit chatting or asking unimportant questions and be prepared such as having your card/cash etc ready in your hand.

I remember once in a very long queue for the car hire desks at an airport. We were stood in it for over an hour and it was moving glacially slowly. Maybe each person taking 10-15 minutes to pick up the keys and sign the paperwork etc. When it got to my turn, I had the paperwork in one hand, credit card in the other hand, and I was dealt with within around 2 minutes. That was because I was prepared and wasn't asking a hundred and one questions and had pre-researched the various insurance options so didn't need it all explaining to me as it was already clearly explained on their website.

Same in our post office, it's super easy to look online at the Royal Mail website to see the options re speed, tracking, sizing, etc., so when I take a parcel/letter, I know exactly what I want, ask for it, and am in and out in a minute or two. Yet sometimes, stuck behind people who've not got a clue and need every permutation of options explained to them in detail, often requiring repeating when they forget! It's all on the website you muppet! Fair enough for older people who may not have the internet, but younger people do it it - the ones who are glued to social media on their phones and who could easily google for the best option beforehand.

Good lord. Have you been attending a 'Hilariously arch, snarky internet posting for beginners' class?

If your time is so important that you can't be held up from your urgent walk, perhaps you should make your own coffee and take it with you. I'll have my coffee however I like it, thanks. I can't have cow's milk, so the server might have to get a whole other carton out of the fridge

I missed the first wave of the Subway trend so I’m now too scared to go in because I don’t understand it.

Brilliant ideas. Love the idea of some kind of "being organised" loyalty card scheme to jump the queues of the terminally disorganised.

About queuing in banks (so rather a vintage text), but the same problem: Richard Brautigan’s “Complicated Banking Problems” (from “Revenge of the Lawn”)

Edit: Well, similar. Apart from the skeleton, probably.

It doesn't really.
Nor does using "milk" that is not dairy, or decaf coffee, or even squirting a bit of cream on.
The cold frappe ones are the ones that take slightly longer.

The main issue generally seems to be people who can't decide, or baristas who drift around and don't multi task, or having one person/one machine making drinks whilst another takes orders far faster than drinks can be made!

I think a lot of it is down to the training of the baristas, though.

In big cities where they have long queues first thing in the morning for coffee, it’s served so fast that you’ve barely had time to pay before it’s whacked onto the counter and off you go.

Outside those places, the baristas seem to have a very leisurely approach, even when they think they’re being quick. I really think that as part of their training, they should have to do a fortnight in some central city location so that they learn to get their skates on when people are waiting.

Re. Airport faffing - I seem to unintentionally be ones of these every time! It would help if the rules were consistent - instead of suddenly asking me to remove (lace up) shoes after letting everyone in front of me through with them on.