The queue was the living flesh inside a rigid state machine: it softened people's contact with officials and fed a black market that brought small pleasures. When the free market abolished it, many found the loss more frightening than past hardships, because it ended a shared, dreamlike way of life.
Under state distribution, the queue was more than a crowd: it was the rule that handed out entitlements over time, with people waiting years for cars or flats. Waiting itself became the price of a good, and handing out numbers and calling the roll turned the crowd into an orderly institution.
People join a line because others are joining it, and judge it worth staying because new people keep arriving behind them. The goods at the front can stay unknown, yet everyone assumes they are of the highest quality and necessity.
The people who work where scarce goods are sold have a way around the queue that the waiting crowd never sees. Days of patient, dutiful waiting can turn out to be in vain once someone with access shows how things really work.