Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Co-waiting: Why customers waiting together is not wasted time

It still blows my mind how Steve Jobs and his team at Apple were able to pull off this passion for the iPhone and all other Apple products. I am not an Apple devotee, so maybe, just maybe, I will never understand what it is about those products that creates such loyal fans. It is hard to miss the peculiar electricity in the air anytime there is anticipation for the launch of an Apple product.

There would be countdowns. The forums would be buzzing. The comment sections of social media platforms would be alive with a kind of restless energy that is difficult to describe and even more difficult to look away from. People who have never met, who live in entirely different countries, who have nothing in common apart from a shared enthusiasm for a product that does not yet exist in their hands—these people would all be waiting together. And somehow, the waiting itself becomes a thing.

We tend to think of waiting as the enemy. In the customer service world, especially, the entire enterprise of queue management, callback systems, and digital ticketing exists for one singular purpose: to make waiting disappear, or at the very least, to make it feel shorter. The assumption baked into nearly all of this effort is that waiting is inherently unpleasant—dead time to be endured, a gap between desire and fulfilment that should be closed as quickly as possible. The customer who waits is, by this logic, the customer who suffers.

Right? Well, not quite.

A fascinating study published in the December 2025 edition of the Marketing Letters invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the waiting experience. The research, which examined a public Facebook group formed around the pre-launch of Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operator Modular synthesiser, followed ten weeks of what the researchers call “digital co-waiting”—a period beginning from the product’s announcement all the way through to first deliveries.

Analysing naturally occurring posts, comments, memes, and images, the researchers uncovered something rather remarkable: when waiting moves online and becomes a shared, communal practice, it stops being dead time altogether. It becomes, in the truest sense, an experience in its own right. The study was titled, “The Joys of Waiting: How Consumers Do Waiting Together.”

Now, for anyone who has ever been part of a passionate online community waiting for something they truly wanted—a limited sneaker release, a much-anticipated album, a sequel to a beloved film—this will not come as a complete surprise. But what makes this research valuable is that it goes beyond the anecdote. It gives us the language and the conceptual framework to understand exactly what is happening when consumers wait together, and why it matters.

The researchers draw a sharp and instructive distinction between two states that can coexist during a waiting period: anticipation and savouring. Anticipation, as they define it, is future-oriented—it is the projection of the mind towards the moment of eventual fulfilment, the imagining of what it will be like when the product finally arrives, when the doors finally open, when the wait is finally over. Savouring, on the other hand, is present-focused. It is the capacity to find enjoyment in the waiting itself, right now, in this moment, before the object of desire has even arrived.

What the study reveals is that in an online co-waiting community, both of these states are not merely experienced privately by individual members. They are collectively enacted. The group does not simply happen to be waiting at the same time. The group actively makes the wait meaningful together.

Members narrate the delays to each other. They exchange reassurance when the news is slow or disappointing. They share memes that turn the frustration of waiting into shared humour. They celebrate one another’s arrivals when the first deliveries begin to trickle in. The waiting, in short, becomes a socio-temporal practice—a thing the community does together, rather than a thing its members merely endure alone.

As a matter of fact, one of the most intriguing findings of the research concerns the emotional arc of the waiting period. Common sense might suggest that as the wait drags on, the emotional engagement of the community would steadily decline—that enthusiasm would wane, that interest would cool, that people would drift away. The research found the opposite to be true. Emotional engagement was cyclical, not linear. There were peaks and lulls, yes—but the lulls were followed by fresh peaks, sparked by new announcements, unexpected delays, the first images of the product in someone’s hands. The emotional life of the waiting group was, in this sense, remarkably resilient.

I have realised that this finding has implications well beyond the world of consumer electronics and synthesiser enthusiasts. It speaks to something fundamental about what community does to the human experience of time. We are social creatures at our core, and even the most unpleasant experiences become more bearable—and sometimes even enjoyable—when we go through them alongside others who understand exactly what we are feeling. A long queue that would be miserable when endured in silent isolation can become the setting for unexpected friendships, shared laughter, and a story worth telling later, simply because the people around us are in it with us.

For businesses, the practical implications of this research are genuinely worth pausing over. If a brand is about to launch a product or service that is going to involve any meaningful waiting period—whether due to pre-orders, limited supply, a phased rollout, or any other reason—the instinctive response is usually to apologise for the wait and promise it will be over soon. What this research suggests is that a far more sophisticated and rewarding approach is available. Rather than simply minimising the wait, brands can actively design the waiting experience to foster exactly the kind of co-waiting community that the study describes.

Think about what that would look like in practice. A dedicated online space—a group, a forum, a community channel—where customers waiting for the same product can gather and connect. Regular updates that give the community something to respond to and discuss, not just to absorb passively.

Opportunities for members to share their own anticipation and excitement in ways that enrich the experience of others. A brand voice that leans into the shared waiting narrative rather than hiding from it. Done well, the waiting period stops being a liability and becomes one of the most potent community-building opportunities a brand will ever have.

One can only imagine the number of brands that have inadvertently squandered this opportunity. How many product launches have been preceded by weeks of awkward silence from the company, during which eager customers were left to form their own unsanctioned communities in corners of the internet that the brand could neither see nor shape? How many of those communities have spent their co-waiting time nursing frustrations that might have been transformed into enthusiasm, had only the brand chosen to step in and make the wait worth something?

The research also touches on something that I believe deserves its own extended meditation: the conversion of anticipation into savouring. There is a moment in every prolonged wait when the future-focused excitement of anticipation begins to settle into a more present-tense enjoyment of the experience as it is happening.

The researchers describe this as a process—not an event, but a gradual shift that unfolds over time within the community. Understanding this process gives brands a meaningful role to play. They can design touchpoints and moments that encourage this shift, that help waiting customers move from anxiously counting the days to genuinely enjoying the journey.

The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, who had much to say about the nature of time, once wrote that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. There is wisdom in that observation that cuts directly to the heart of what this research is saying. The waiting customer who is left alone with only their imagination—free to picture all manner of disappointments and delays—is the customer most likely to suffer through the wait. But the waiting customer who is part of a warm, active, engaged community has something else to occupy that same imagination: the shared story of the wait itself.

Waiting, it turns out, is not the problem. Waiting alone is.

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