survival of the fittest

テレグラフ紙にデンマークでのqueuingについて書かれていました。survival of the fittest（適者生存）というDarwinのことばが使われていて興味を引かれました。（GP）

Survival of the fittest in Danish supermarkets

The British love a queue. We gravitate towards them in any given situation and if there isn’t one handy, we’ll start our own. I have queued in horizontal rain, blizzards, inappropriate footwear, and even – once – a heatwave. I know when to stand, when to sit, and when to take reading material, and have long felt confident that I had queueing nailed. That is, until I moved to Denmark.

The Danes are a step ahead of us when it comes to waiting in line. There are queues in banks, bakeries, bus stops, car parks, restaurants, ticket offices - any offices, in fact. There are even queues to tear off a number from an old-style dispenser (last seen in UK delicatessens circa 1998) and stand in another queue.

Denmark’s line legacy is a source of some pride. Queueing theory, the mathematical study of waiting lines, was created by Danish statistician Agner Krarup Erlang in 1909 to describe the Copenhagen telephone exchange. He helped create the four queueing disciplines of last in first out, where the customer with the shortest waiting time is served first (to hit targets); priority queueing, where customers who’ve paid for the privilege are served first; sharing, where each customer gets equal attention; and first in first out, where the customer who’s been waiting the longest gets their go first.

Egalitarian Danes tend to opt for the latter two and, on the whole, things run beautifully – despite the fact that my pockets consistently contain confetti handfuls of delicatessen-style paper tickets.

But this noble queueing etiquette isn’t applied in one crucial arena of modern life: supermarkets. Here, as far as I can make out, there are just two rules: get to the front of the queue by any means possible (whilst feigning nonchalance), then get out as fast as you can (whilst feigning extreme busyness).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/9909453/Survival-of-the-fittest-in-Danish-supermarkets.html