The anxiety of running a business with queues out the door.

At its peak the queue of people lining up outside Lune Croissanterie in Melbourne began at 5am while Jack’s Burgers in Sydney had to shut up shop temporarily in its first week such was the demand.
A queue of eager customers desperate for your product seems like every business owner’s dream but out-of-control demand can also alienate customers and lead to unrealistic expectations.
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Kate Reid started her business with her brother Cameron out of a hole in the wall in Elwood and their croissants quickly gained cult status.
“Initially word got out about the quality and variety of our pastries,” Reid says. “We got a lot of repeat business as often people were queuing up there every week. The problem with the line was that it also scared a lot of people away from trying the product.”

Reid moved Lune to bigger premises in Fitzroy and more than doubled production from 1100 pastries a week to 2500 but she still opened the doors on the first weekend to a line stretching around the block
“In Fitzroy we have the capacity and the ability to produce more croissants and we are in the process of trying to re-educate everyone who thinks it’s necessary to queue up at 5am and change the behaviour and pattern,” Reid says. “It’s OK to come at 11.30am, you are still going to get a ham cheese croissant that has just come out of the oven.”
Reid still opens Lune’s door to a line of about 30 or 40 people every morning, but is working hard to keep up with demand.
“We do want to expand our opening hours,” Reid says. “We are slowly and sustainably building our team because we really want to maintain the quality of the pastry. There are many bakers and pastry chefs out there that can make croissants but there is no other bakery in the world that uses the technique specific to Lune so it takes a lot of training”.
To try to keep the “intimacy and experience” of Lune’s original Elwood store Reid has introduced the “Lune Lab” for customers who want to skip the queue for the cost of a $50 ticket.
“Some people wanted to line up, they made friends in the line. Creating the Lune Lab was almost like creating the number one to eight ticket again and instead of getting there at crazy o’clock in the morning you can book a ticket.”
Lune now turns over about $1 million a year and Reid says the popularity of her croissants are one of the “biggest challenges” the business faces.

“This is a handcrafted product and if we used all machines to make it we could supply every cafe in Melbourne,” she says. “The thing that makes it special is that it is made by the hands of the two people who own the business. I don’t like disappointing people but it’s a good challenge to have. I’d prefer that to opening the doors to nobody.”
A SOURCE OF ANXIETY
Jack Fonteyn says the instant popularity of Jack’s Burgers in Newtown when he opened in October last year was “initially very overwhelming”.
“But now that we have found our feet, my biggest concern about having those queues is it is really hard to keep everything to the same standard when you have a lot of quantity,” he says. “Doing the numbers we were doing it was almost impossible to keep the quality up.”
Fonteyn’s concerns played out on social media with some customers raving about Jack’s Burgers while others slammed it for failing to live up the hype.
Social media has driven much of the demand for Jack’s Burgers after early comparisons were made to cult American burger chain Shake shack, Fonteyn says.
“It’s been a real learning experience the last couple of months,” he says. “I was completely unaware of the power of it.”
Five months after opening the queue is still out the door at Jack’s Burgers but Fonteyn says staff are better equipped to deal with the demand and trade is levelling out.
“Now it’s less anxiety and more a happy thing,” he says.
Jack’s Burgers now sells up to 1000 burgers a night and Fonteyn hopes nearby Sydney University and RPA Hospital will provide an ongoing customer base as long as would-be-regulars are not deterred by the current popularity of the burger joint.
“I hope not because it is honestly the best part of the day if I notice a face that has come in before,” Fonteyn says. “They are the people you really want to take care of because they are supporting you.”
INCREASING REMARK-ABILITY
Katharina Kuehn, director and co-founder of RDG Insights, says queues increase the “remark-ability and talk-ability” of any business, which, now multiplied by social media sharing, are two key success factors for any business. “Put simply, a queue is a non-conscious signal of success and desirability,” she says.
Customers are attracted to businesses with long queues because they draw attention to the limited amount of stock that is left, time limitation or barriers of accessibility which increases the perceived value of the product or service and makes the customer want to hunt it down, Kuehn says.
Underlying this is the principle of social desirability, meaning that humans tend to observe and imitate other humans’ behaviour to help us understand what is normal and what is appropriate.
“A crowd will always draw a crowd,” Kuehn says. “It’s consumers’ inbuilt herd instinct.”
But Kuehn says these dynamics work best in categories that are occasion or lifestyle driven, with a unique point of difference and more often than not at a price premium positioning, such as Lune Croissanterie, Sneakerboy in Melbourne, Gelato Messina or Apple.
“In high-frequency categories, where consumers are seeking to satisfy functional everyday needs queues are without exception an absolute deterrent and achieve the adverse effect of contributing to the popularity of a business,” she says.
THE WEIGHT OF EXPECTATIONS
For his part, Fonteyn says it’s hard for any burger to live up to the expectations of someone who has queued for up to an hour before ordering.
“Although it’s incredible to have that popularity if I waited personally 45 minutes for something it would have to be the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life to justify it,” he says.