In the early hours of Wednesday inside the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham there were scenes reminiscent of a political sit-in, or perhaps an emergency shelter. Clips shared on social media show hundreds of people sitting or lying quietly on the floor, tightly packed together. “Regretting life decisions at the moment,” wrote one TikTok poster. “Currently 5.12am… Glad to be here but vvv sleep deprived someone send help.”

Happily, that young woman revealed, she was number 259, meaning that in a few hours she would be given some beauty products for her trouble. This was the overnight queue for the opening of a branch of the cosmetics retailer Sephora, with hundreds sleeping on the shopping centre floor for the opportunity to visit the new store and, for the lucky first 500, receive a gift bag. Numbered tickets had gone well before midnight.

It came after a similarly popular event last weekend, when shoppers thronged outside a warehouse sale for the cookware brand Le Creuset in Andover, leading to bewilderingly long car and pedestrian queues, and a callout to Hampshire police to help with crowd control. “If we had known it would have been 4 hours we wouldn’t haven’t bothered,” wrote a commenter on another TikTok video. On the other hand: “We did spend £1,150 so it was definitely worth it.”

There can be nothing worse, much of the time, than being stuck for hours in a lengthy and slow-moving queue – as the thousands who have tried to buy Glastonbury tickets online this week have also experienced. On the other hand, the reason queues are long, by definition, is because so many of us want to join them.

“Human beings are mimetic animals,” says Joe Moran, a cultural historian and professor of humanities at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written about queues among other daily mundanities. “We tend to like things because other people like them, and want things because other people want them. A queue is just a visible manifestation of that.”

Not all queues, self-evidently, are for inessentials such as frying pans and makeup, and even the old joke that the British will join a queue first and ask only later what it is for, is rooted in serious fact, says Moran. In wartime Britain there is evidence that people would do exactly that, he says: “because they reasoned, probably rightly, that if there was a queue there was something good and unrationed at the end of it”.

The self-flattering notion that the British are the best queuers in the world appears to have emerged during that period, he suggests, “when actually queueing was very fraught” and often needed police involvement. “The mythology seems to have developed partly to ease those tensions.” Queues are only orderly when people aren’t desperate.

Le Creuset has apologised for being unprepared for the numbers that turned up, reflecting an ambivalence among retailers to making customers wait. On the one hand, says Charlotte Hardie, editor in chief of Retail Week, shop-owners are desperate to minimise off-putting queues – or “friction points” – in the path from shelf to till.

“A good example recently would be Marks & Spencer installing self-checkout in their fitting rooms. There’s a lot of investment in ensuring that the consumers don’t have any barrier to handing over their cash.”

On the other hand – assuming you don’t actually need what is at the end of the line – queueing can be an entertainment in itself. The long, long line for tickets at Wimbledon has become part of the tournament experience; notably, the club’s recently-approved redevelopment plans included a reassurance that “The Queue” – always capitalised – will be unaffected.

And for some shoppers, says Hardie, the queue can be just as important as the product at the end. “Many young teenagers would be more than happy to queue for a Sephora store. All you need to do is post it on your TikTok, your friends talk about it. It’s viewed as a hobby. It’s a form of entertainment.”