This is not bad luck. The queues are communicating.

They wait until you are under-caffeinated, identify the tiny crack in your decision-making, and quietly rearrange themselves after you commit. Somewhere above the fluorescent lights, a grocery-store control room is watching you whisper, “I knew I should have picked the other one.”

Scientists may call this selective attention. You remember the slow lines because they annoy you and forget the normal ones because nobody writes memoirs about an uneventful checkout.

That explanation is reasonable, which is exactly why I distrust it.

The coffee-shop line follows similar rules, but with one important difference: there is coffee at the end. This changes the emotional mathematics. Waiting six minutes for detergent feels like a personal attack. Waiting six minutes for a fresh cup feels like civilization is still trying.

Coffee cannot guarantee that you will choose the fastest line. It can, however, help you accept that the universe has once again placed a trainee cashier directly in your path for character-development purposes.

And once the cup is in your hand, the other line can move as quickly as it likes. You have stopped competing. You have coffee.

That is what victory looks like before 9 a.m.

Coffee note

This week’s global coffee roundup is a useful reminder that the cup in your hand belongs to an enormous, restless industry. World Coffee Portal reports expansion plans, ownership changes, workforce moves, and continued strength in coffee as a major commercial category—including Kopi Kenangan’s reported plan to fund substantial international growth.

Read the article: https://www.worldcoffeeportal.com/news/the-week-in-coffee-20-26-july-2026/

Choose carefully, queue bravely,

john