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It’s a Sunday afternoon late in June, and as is the case pretty much every day of the week, there is a line at Caffè Panna, an ice-cream shop in Greenpoint that sells perfectly Instagrammable scoops of artisanal scrumdiddlyumptiousness. Though the store doesn’t open for another five minutes, there are more than 50 people, two stroller babies, one Italian greyhound, and one Maltipoo waiting in an orderly line on the sidewalk outside. For every customer who eventually claims their order — “For Hannah! For Harry! For Anna!” — and walks off devouring it, another two seem to appear, creating a never-ending human centipede that stretches from the window, down the block, past an advertisement for the new Olivia Rodrigo album, and around the corner onto another block. The line is inching along slowly, and the clouds are threatening rain, but no one seems bothered. Everyone is beaming. Passersby — bicyclists, drivers, and pedestrians alike — slow down when they encounter the thing, occasionally letting out a squeal of wonder (“What is this line?”) or judgment (“What is this line?”).
Within a quick walk, there are plenty more lines in the neighborhood: for pastries (at Radio Bakery), tacos (Taqueria Ramírez), pizza (Chrissy’s), coffee (Rhythm Zero), matcha (Kettl), ceviche (Mariscos El Submarino), katsu sandwiches (Taku Sando), and more katsu (ACRE). Even during the week, in the middle of the day, it’s not a rarity to see a line of phone scrollers dawdling down India Street toward Radio Bakery. “Is that a bread line?” a visiting family member, looking perplexed, asked me completely seriously not long ago when we strolled past. In some ways, I tried to explain to him.
Lines
New York has always had lines for the sorts of experiences you can’t get anywhere else: Broadway tickets, skyscraper observation decks, Cronuts. This summer’s lines, though, can seem borderline ludicrous: three to a street, blocks long, often for the types of things you can get almost anywhere in the city, like bagels, pizza, and pastries. They emerged slowly over the past few years and then like a flood, a cumulative effect of TikTok constantly showing all of us what we are missing out on in our very own boroughs. The temptation is almost too strong — why not take the train 15 minutes to figure out if that slice of pizza is as good as everyone on your “For You” page is telling you it is? “It’s herd mentality,” one young woman, nearly rolling her eyes at herself for joining the masses, tells me at Myka, a fro-yo chain that is arguably the site of this summer’s longest lines. Now, across the city, especially along the Brooklyn waterfront and in much of downtown, people are waiting for an ever-diversifying assortment of viral snacks and “sweet treats” (to use the preferred language of Instagram influencers), all the while petting one another’s dogs, gossiping with friends, minding their toddlers, checking Slack, and scrolling away their remaining time in line. As one TikToker captioned a video taken in the West Village on the first nice day of spring in March, “The sun is out and New Yorkers are back with their favorite activity of waiting in line.” A company called Same Ole Line Dudes (tagline: We Wait for Your Wants!) will even wait in line for you, starting at a price of $55.
Naturally, some New Yorkers are getting persnickety about the situation. “I would never stand in a line. It just seems so déclassé,” the podcaster Francesca Root-Dodson tells me. When I run into a Real Housewife I know on my way to wait in line at Caffè Panna’s original location in Gramercy Park, she says, “When I was growing up here, standing in a line was not a cool thing. Now there’s a whole culture around it. The only thing worth waiting in line for is a Balenciaga sample sale.” The Caffè Panna line is monitored by a camera installed by a mysterious website called damnlines.com. (One Wednesday in July at 4:20 p.m., the website estimates a 25-minute wait; near 30 people are in line.) As such haters’ thinking usually goes, waiting in a line is the lemminglike behavior of tourists in Times Square trying to get a deal on last-minute tickets for The Lion King. Standing in a line is what you do pissily at the airport or Disney World. (Also, self-described real New Yorkers like to say you wait on line, not in one. The mere mention of this distinction can send people into long, impassioned debates about the importance of regional dialect.) “These kids today on these stupid lines,” Dorothy Wiggins, a 100-year-old influencer and West Village resident recently complained on Instagram. (Note her use of on.) “It’s crazy! Just crazy!” Her hairdresser, also featured in the video, shared that she would never stand in line because she grew up under communism.
Others have taken to championing the line people. “I don’t like when people make fun of the people who stand around in long lines,” the downtown writer known as Sotce recently wrote on her Substack. “Some people read Substack, some people wait in a line. Some people have vintage denim and read books by dead people. And really we all die.”
“I’m not somebody who would wait in line,” the owner of the Italian greyhound tries to assure me outside the Greenpoint Caffè Panna. Yet she has just done exactly that, waiting 15 minutes for her Nutella Crunch ice cream, which she doesn’t sound at all embarrassed about as she devours the ice cream in less time than it took to order it. “When you see there’s a line, it means the place is good,” her friend, the owner of the Maltipoo, tells me. Just the day before, she went to Caffè Panna’s other location, where she also waited in a line. Nearby, two sisters, tourists from Boston, snap photos of their scoops before digging in. “All the lines have felt worth it,” one tells me; for breakfast, they waited in a line at Apollo Bagels in Williamsburg. They’d seen all this hoopla on social media and couldn’t resist sussing out the hype for themselves. “I would rather stand in this line here than go figure out another place to go,” one says to me.
“For Grace!”
“For Jessica!”
“For Sarah M.!”
9:09 A.M. Butterfield Market.
Photo: Natan Dvir/Natan Dvir
I hate the lines. I hate looking at them,” says Joelle Obsatz, a co-owner of Butterfield Market, an upscale Upper East Side grocery store that sells all sorts of influencer fare — $75 imported Japanese strawberries, fancy chicken fingers, and the undeniable sweet treat of the summer, frozen yogurt — meaning that now, the grocery is more often than not beset by lines. Obsatz tells me she doesn’t identify as a line person herself. “I’m very impatient. It creates anxiety inside of me,” she says. Nor does she necessarily like seeing them in front of her business: “They clutter the street and make me feel guilty for having people wait.”
Obsatz and I are speaking during the Great Dot Cake Craze of early June 2026. Seemingly out of nowhere, a Long Island bakery went viral for its heavily sprinkled, ASMR-friendly, single-serving cakes, and before long, hordes of young people persuaded by their algorithms to crave “cake in a cup” were lining up outside Butterfield, which had been stocking Dot Cakes unnoticed since September. “One day, I could get them every Friday night for my daughter, then the next week, I couldn’t get them,” says Obsatz. With the sudden influx of customers, Butterfield was forced to establish a second line, one for fro-yo and one for the cakes. She told a Fox News camera crew that showed up that people were driving in from Philadelphia. Before long, someone added a section about Dot Cakes and “long lines” to Butterfield’s Wikipedia page.
With two lines now streaming from the market, Obsatz brushed up on “line management.” She added more point-of-sale systems, more employees stationed on the sidewalk to play traffic controllers, and Supreme-style drops for the Dot Cakes on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. and Sundays at 9 a.m., quiet times of day for the grocery. So far, she says, she hasn’t had any issues with her neighbors, a problem for other businesses in her situation. (Last spring, the New York Times reported a line-weary local had dumped water on customers waiting outside a bakery in the East Village.) “The people who are most upset are the people who come to our markets three times a day and it’s cramping their lifestyle, messing with their regular flow,” she says. Since she has mostly been able to keep up with demand, she hasn’t felt the wrath of angry line people — unlike Hallie Meyer, the owner of Caffè Panna. “I get hate mail every day,” Meyer tells me, sounding just a little annoyed at what she calls “the big dumb line TikTok-hype thing.” Her shop has had a line pretty much every summer since it opened — people seemed to enjoy the revolving flavors and buffet of toppings on offer — but this summer has been especially intense. Last spring, Caffè Panna sold around 400 of her mango sticky-rice sundaes in a week; this summer, she sold 6,000 in under four days. It’s difficult to keep up. “We literally make everything by hand. It’s not like we’re dropping 250 pints of something because we’re trying to be difficult,” she says. Her stores close at 9:30 p.m., in part to appease her neighbors but also because by then they’ve usually run out of ice cream. Another business owner tells me that customers in Brooklyn tend to be “chiller” when the product sells out. “In Manhattan,” they say, “there’s more of a sense of entitlement.”
The thing these businesses seem to fear most is losing their lines. Since the Dot Cake went viral, Butterfield has sold 2,560 per week, the maximum number the Roslyn Heights bakery can produce for the grocery. That’s in addition to the 39,899 cups of frozen yogurt the market says it sold to more than 35,000 customers this June. Everyone seems to be trying a different strategy to stay relevant, understanding what any influencer knows: Ride that Hawk Tuah as long as possible. Butterfield’s Instagram account reshares posts from customers with their Dot Cakes and fro-yo throughout the day, and in the fall, the market will debut a special celebrity “chicken-salad collaboration” that will undoubtedly draw more lines. Meyer, despite being a line skeptic, recently put out a collaboration with Dot Cake. Needless to say, it moved much more inventory than her basil-cantaloupe granita.
The co-owner of one popular Brooklyn bakery, who declined to be named because he didn’t want to “participate in the line conversation,” tells me he almost cried when the Infatuation called his lines “worth it” — the greatest compliment that can be bestowed upon any of these businesses, nervous as they are that the lines may be ruining their reputations. “It’s not that I don’t like the line,” Obsatz says to me at the end of our call, taking a more generous view of her paying customers. “I mean, good things are worth the wait. So maybe I’m missing out.”
5:13 P.M. New York or Nowhere.
Photo: Natan Dvir/Natan Dvir
7:20 P.M. Culture frozen yogurt.
Photo: Natan Dvir/Natan Dvir
Waiting on line is the curse of the city,” Michael Schrage wrote in this magazine in June 1981. “Each time you press an elevator button, go down into the subway, or venture inside a bank or post office during lunch hour, you know that you’re going to end up on a line, forced to wait your turn like everyone else. No amount of ingenuity or charm will alter the fact that you are now a mere point in space and time. In a word, you are powerless.” It’s true that New Yorkers have found plenty to stand in line for over the years. In 2004, Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack opened a kiosk in Madison Square Park, and two years later the company installed its “Shack Cam” so people at home could watch those waiting for burgers. In 2010, 1,500 people waited for the chance to gaze deeply into Marina Abramovic’s eyes at MoMA. In 2015, there were Hamilton tickets. Last year, the West Village Girls all lined up for Swedish candy at Lil Sweet Treat and BonBon. In between, there have been endless lines for streetwear drops and hard-to-get-into nightclubs and outside Studio 8H for Saturday Night Live on Friday afternoons.
No line in the past 15 years has left more of a mark on the city than the one for Dominique Ansel’s Cronut, which debuted in 2013 and almost immediately begat a black market of scalpers. The Frankenstein pastry was meant to be a Mother’s Day special, then word spread and hundreds of people showed up on Spring Street. “We had very early iPhones with grainy cameras, and I think I only took a few photos of the Cronut, one of which we shared online,” says Ansel. “Then a writer came and posted a story on his blog. I remember we made about 30 on that first day. By day three, there were 150 people outside before we opened.” Back then, the bakery had just four employees (two cooks and two cashiers), Ansel tells me. “This happened so suddenly there was no time to think. It felt too hectic to even pause. We were focused on trying to get through it day by day.” Ansel took to handing out lemonade to the line people in the summer and hand warmers during the winter and even hired what he calls “line bouncers.” “We received our fair share of angry letters and death threats,” he says. “I would come in early before the team arrived to clean up the letters so they wouldn’t feel intimidated. We couldn’t understand how it happened. People nowadays talk about marketing plans, social-media strategies, etc. That wasn’t a notion we had 13 years ago.”
Now, of course, anything can be a Cronut. A quick 46-second post in the middle of the winter about Caffè Panna’s banana-pudding soft serve can rack up well over 100,000 views. Legions of self-appointed food-critic influencers roam the city, posting constantly about any vaguely trendy new restaurant — or about small restaurants that don’t yet have a line, the specialty of food influencer Matt Peterson, who has recently devoted his page to “boycotting” the “line epidemic.” It is no surprise his posts have only created more lines: When he advertised a food truck in midtown that had been vandalized during the post-Knicks-win celebration, the owner was soon so overwhelmed that he asked Peterson to request his 6.4 million followers stay home. Despite the protest series, Peterson is, in fact, pro-line. “Let’s go line up for them!” he says of the small businesses his account promotes. “Let’s spread the line.” Even Ansel seems caught off guard by how thirsty everyone is. “It’s become almost a social activity for people to wait in line for something,” he says.
While standing in lines this summer, I’ve asked people to ask themselves what made them decide to wait, and while the most common answer was, of course, their “For You” pages, the second most common self-diagnosis was FOMO. “New York is very big on FOMO,” a college student tells me outside Caffè Panna. “No one wants to miss out on the best fro-yo of your life.” (Which does beget another tough question for our moment, How good can fro-yo even be?) Hallie Meyer at Caffè Panna wonders if the lines are a product of work-from-home culture: “Maybe the average yuppie has more time to be physically where they want to be and work in line. I personally take calls in the Radio line.” One Brooklyn bakery owner considers whether it is a sign of economic distress. A $9.50 croissant is “comparably inexpensive to other things you could treat yourself to. It’s about having an accessible, affordable treat and activity. That maybe you earned from a workout.” Everyone, even the business owners so proud of their product, seem baffled that a city of crotchety, impatient New Yorkers could morph so easily into upstanding citizens waiting politely for a $14 cup of fro-yo.
“We’ve always had FOMO online, and now it’s FOMO IRL,” Chloe Fineman tells me over the phone one day while she’s waiting in traffic in L.A., echoing the student from Caffè Panna almost verbatim. Last spring, Fineman pitched the SNL skit “Big Dumb Line,” a musical number starring Joe Jonas about people waiting around in lines, which she’d noticed outside the Myka frozen-yogurt shop in her neighborhood. In her sketch, the end of the line is just a fine slice of pizza, a disappointment. In reality, Fineman says, she loves Myka. The day it opened, she walked past the line multiple times, hoping she might be recognized and allowed to skip it. She has learned to respect its democratizing presence. “It’s pretty humbling and pretty humiliating,” she tells me. “You shouldn’t be above the line.”
I’ve come to agree. For all the eye-rolling the lines have inspired, who are any of us to judge? I waste plenty of time waiting around New York. Waiting for an Uber. Waiting 27 minutes for the G train. Waiting in line to get into the club. Waiting in line for a drink at the club. Waiting in line for the restroom at the club. More embarrassing: waiting in line to check out at Trader Joe’s. More braggy: waiting in line at the Prada sample sale. None of these rewarded me with a sweet treat at the end. After I waited in line for frozen yogurt for the first time, it occurred to me that as much as I enjoyed the yogurt itself, I liked the feeling that I’d accomplished something even more; it was almost as if I’d just hit the gym. Maybe, as a friend recently suggested, there’s something nice about forgoing all the easy access we’re afforded these days and forcing ourselves to wait our turn. Anyway, I couldn’t help but notice while talking to people about the lines that the only people mad about them are those not standing in them. The line people are happy. They’re getting dessert.
8:03 P.M. L’Industrie Pizzeria.
Photo: Natan Dvir/Natan Dvir
9:21 P.M. Myka Greek Frozen Yogurt.
Photo: Natan Dvir/Natan Dvir
There should be no surprise that the West Village, the capital of this city on TikTok, has become one massive, yoga-set-filled line. On a Monday evening in June, a not insignificant stretch of Seventh Avenue between Charles and Perry Streets is packed by two warring lines for Myka and Birdie’s, frozen-yogurt shops located directly across from each other.
At Myka at five o’clock, 22 people are in line; within five minutes, I hear three passersby mumble, “Long line.” The young woman in front of me tells her friend she has plans to go to the Myka at Rockefeller Center later this evening with another friend. “That can be your dinner,” she replies. Fro-yo, one line person says to me while I traverse the neighborhood, is healthier than ice cream, so therefore it is the perfect dessert for anyone on Ozempic.
In 15 seconds, ten people join the Myka line. The employee baking in the near-90-degree heat gets sent on an air-conditioning break. Nearby, a woman marches in place, getting her steps in as she waits. “I still feel like I’m making more than most people in marketing …” continues the young woman in front of me, talking to her friend.
One understated perk of the line is that it’s great for people watching and especially for eavesdropping. Everyone sounds like they’re gossiping about something good just to kill the time. “Has there ever been a scandal like that? Of analysts dating their boss?” whispers a young woman behind me. “Apparently, he hooked up with his intern.”
Almost universally, before the line people eat, their cameras do. I observe one woman hold her yogurt in the air and ask her sister to step back 15 feet to create a sort of Tower of Pisa effect. “Pretend to be scooping!” she says. With pictures posted to Instagram, they dig in.
Another passerby nearly cusses at us. “Oh. My. God. People love to wait in lines,” she barks to her boyfriend. “It’s Monday fucking night. What is going on? It’s out of control! I don’t understand! Is it just for the photo? Is it just to say you had it?”
Shortly after 9 p.m., the line at Myka is 69 strong, stretching past six storefronts and then around a side street to avoid extending into the crosswalk. By the time I type the number into my phone, five more people have joined. Before long, there are 100 people in line and half that at Birdie’s across the street. “If we can all be ridiculous in line together, then we can survive it,” one giggly finance girl tells me. She’s a self-described fro-yo expert — her boyfriend made her a PowerPoint of her favorite fro-yo shops in New York on Claude — and brought her co-workers after their book club. This was an excuse to keep hanging out together. “It’s a third space,” one of her co-workers tells me, though I can’t help but think our collective situation is dire if fro-yo lines now count as a so-called third space.
Soon, a fabulous-looking duo of middle-aged women opt to join the kids. “They know something I don’t know,” one says, pointing at all the young people. “When you lose interest in what’s happening in pop culture, you’re sort of deciding to tap out,” she says to me. “That feels sad. I don’t want to do that. Let’s see what it’s about. It doesn’t hurt anything. Why not?” She’d just asked someone who waited an hour if the yogurt is worth it, and they told her, “Eh.” She decided to stay in line.
