Here are some reasons I can think of to stand stock-still on a busy sidewalk: You practice Taoist meditation; you are employed in the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace; a bee has landed on your nose, and you’re too terrified to move. Recently, though, New York City has been overrun by throngs of sidewalk standers who are doing what they’re doing in order to buy plain old frozen yogurt, beautifully illustrating how one person’s “reasonable” can be another person’s “deranged.”
Why froyo? Why line up for hours onend for it? Why don’t I understand my fellow man? To answer these questions, the only thing to do was don the largest pair of sunglasses I own and get in line.
People will line up for anything in this city, it’s true. There are “Saturday Night Live” sketches about this. There are 13 years’ worth of think pieces about what the culture of the cronut has wrought. Still, none of this explains why some teeny new frozen-yogurt places with socialite names — Mimi’s, Myka, Birdie’s — are drawing as much foot traffic as sample sales or sneaker drops. On one of the hottest Saturdays of the year, under a noontime sun, I counted 74 people waiting in front of me at Myka, a noncommitally Mediterranean yogurt shop on Seventh Avenue in the West Village that had set up a maze of blue velvet ropes outside its entrance.
While we all waited, dribbling a collective lake of sweat, I poked my fellow liner-uppers and asked them how they had come to be there. (I should note that while it’s pretty much in the Constitution that a hot day demands a cold treat, I have walked by this two-month-old shop in frigid rain and still seen dozens waiting, turtling inside their sweaters.) Answers were divisible into three categories: “Because this place is delicious.” “Because the line made me curious.” And of course, that old culprit: “It came up on my TikTok feed.”
That social media is the root cause of the long line is not up for debate. The more interesting question these days, though, is whether the snowball effect of online hype is organic — a genuine result of ordinary people making a discovery, then evangelizing — or whether it is deliberately engineered by a business trying to go viral. (In 2006, even before Instagram, Shake Shack turned a webcam on its Madison Square Park queue and made the line itself a kind of can’t-miss event.) I can’t prove that Myka had carved a wall of whimsical sconces or set out kaleidoscopic toppings in gorgeous ceramic bowls to improve its likelihood of being photographed. But the company is an investment-backed venture that has aggressively expanded from one location to several dozen in three years, just like many other chains following a similar marketing playbook — Milk Bar, Crumbl, Blank Street Coffee.
I learned all this not by entering the store but by tapping around on my phone, which is what I and everyone else did while we were waiting to enter the store. Thirty minutes in, there were still 40 people in front of me. Some gave up and slinked off — quitters and cowards! Those of us who remained watched them go with accusation in our eyes. We shifted from one foot to another, like the world’s slowest flash mob.
The few of us who brought companions chattered to those companions: A guy complained to his girlfriend (new job sucks!), a friend group argued (was that wedding gauche?), a father listened patiently to his teenage daughter’s rundown of toppings she planned to get (crumbled baklava, olive oil and a pistachio mix called Mykataifi). The rest of us offered fortifying little smiles whenever we made accidental eye contact, but mostly we looked at our phones.
So we waited together — facing the same direction, suffering under the same conditions, shuffling forward for our participation prize. It was surprisingly tranquil to do this. It was almost Taoist meditation. It was order-keeping at Buckingham Palace. It was paralyzing like a bee sting.
By the time I got to the door, an hour had gone by and I had started to feel affection for my cluster of line, the kind of camaraderie you develop with fellow passengers on a delayed flight. Then, one by one, we made it inside, into the cool burst of A.C. and the promised land of the little treat.
We chose our flavors, our fresh fruits, our artisanal-ish nuts. (The teenage daughter recited her order as if it were John Keats.) We received our prizes. We paid. (Fourteen dollars for a yogurt with three toppings!) People took their obligatory proof-of-experience pictures. And then at the doorstep, a curious thing: Each person turned toward the exit and hesitated — just for a second, not totally ready to leave the line.
A lot of fuss has been made about the death of so-called third places in our modern world, and for good reason. Free public space is disappearing from urban infrastructure. Not enough people are meeting their neighbors or churchgoing or joining bowling leagues. So maybe the lines for viral foods are just due to get longer and longer each year, like an IRL bar chart of American loneliness. Even some of the city’s comparatively ancient froyo shops, like Pinkberry and 16 Handles and Culture, are getting hugged by long lines. Now that the town square is bygone, why not let a well-appointed chain frozen-yogurt store swoop in with some substitute feeling of community and belonging? And yet this solution, like dairy in the hot sun, seems rather precarious.
Down the block, on some random stoop owned by a stranger, I sat and ate my halfway-melted swirl. The first bite was a thrillingly tart bouquet. The second bite was … good. The third bite was cloying. And by the time I got to the bottom of the cup, I wished I’d picked a different set of flavors. But that’s just what you get for following other people.
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