Sunday, 9 a.m. in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, the line for Courage Bagels wraps around the block. From the moment you get in line to the moment you leave with a bag of bagels, you’re looking at up to two hours — for something you could buy somewhere else in five minutes.
Watch what people actually do once they’re in that line, though, and the bagel stops being the point. They’re filming the wait. The timestamp. The number of people ahead of them. It’s not a food video. It’s proof of something else.
This isn’t unique to bagels. Pop Mart customers show up at 1:30 in the morning with folding chairs for a $20 toy. People post screenshots of their place in a digital ticket queue before a single ticket has sold. In New York, people wait an hour for an $11 slice of cake. None of these lines are about scarcity of supply — they’re about something people are choosing, on purpose, in public, with a camera running.
