Had the same idea for a cafè at the beach we visit often. Reserve your place in the queue without having to actually stand there. Then again, if people don’t have to pay the price of standing in line, wouldn’t the line just get longer and longer? Maybe a better approach would be to send in orders. And the business accepts them based on availability and order size. If it’s busy and you just want a coffee, you won’t get a seat. But you will if you’ll order three burgers plus drinks.

so this is Uber eat now. I can't connect before read your comments haha.

I like it. Some restaurants hand out little pagers, this could substitute for those.

I feel like you could align a lot of the incentives here with an X cent “line charge” or something similar?

You get 10min, 5min push notifications, then if you aren’t in the store within 1 min of your spot in line being called, you forfeit the X cents. But if you are then they give you a discount on whatever your buy so the “line charge” nets out.

However, I’m not sure if there exists an X such that A) you’ll risk it for the convenience but B) it’s enough to actually compensate the store if you don’t go

(Could be some interesting behavioral econ approaches there, maybe?)

Fun to think about, thanks for sharing!

what about this: https://www.qmatic.com/solutions/virtual-queuing-system ? isnt this idea implemented already by various entities?

I ended up building this as an open-source project https://github.com/barakplasma/in-person-queue and got intimidated when it came to marketing & selling it (for free)