WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO QUEUE FOR?

I did not want to comment on this whole KFC situation because, honestly, I could not come to a firm conclusion.

Then I realized that perhaps I did not need a conclusion. I could simply ask a question.

Because after all the thoughts I had about what happened, everything eventually came down to one question:

WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO QUEUE FOR?

So, a brief background to the whole event.

KFC has been in Ghana for 15 years, having opened its first restaurant here in 2011. To mark the anniversary, the franchise advertised a promotion where customers could get chicken for GH¢15 for one day.

The day arrived, and as early as 6 a.m. and, judging from videos circulating online, even the night before, people were already lining up outside KFC branches to take advantage of the promotion.

Throughout the day, we saw videos of extremely long queues, with both young and old lining up to get the discounted chicken.

Then the videos of the chaos started coming.

There were reports and videos of crowd crushes, people being pushed around, security personnel using force, and KFC employees using water hoses to disperse crowds.

The immediate comments I saw were mostly from people I would perceive to be somewhere around or above the middle class.

A lot of them were bashing the people who had decided to join these queues for the GH¢15 chicken.

One phrase that kept coming up was:

“Why will you waste your time because of chicken?”

It did not take long for others to come to the defense of those who had lined up in front of KFC branches waiting for their turn to buy the promotional chicken.

Basically, their argument was: if you can drive two or three hours just to go and eat fufu at Aburi because you have the means and you want to, who gave you the authority to question somebody who decides to “waste” their time queuing for GH¢15 chicken?

And I actually understand that argument.

When I first saw the promotion, I was impressed. I immediately thought about the numbers.

I thought, if KFC can actually pull this off, that would be impressive.

But then another thought crossed my mind.

Why would KFC open itself up to this much risk with the law?

Once you deliberately create a promotion that is likely to attract an unusually large crowd, you also have to think about what happens when that crowd actually arrives.

And that is where the law crossed my mind.

I am not saying KFC would automatically be liable for everything that happened simply because it ran a promotion. That would be too simplistic.

But if a customer was injured because KFC failed to take reasonable steps to manage a crowd that it could reasonably have anticipated, then questions of negligence could certainly arise.

The same goes for food safety. If a customer actually became ill because of contaminated or improperly prepared food, the issue would not simply be that the person claimed they became sick. There would have to be evidence connecting the illness to the food and establishing the relevant breach of duty.

There could also be questions of vicarious liability if an employee, while acting in the course of their employment, injured a customer. But again, KFC would not automatically be liable for every act an employee commits. The circumstances of the employee's conduct would matter.

So the question for KFC is not simply whether something went wrong.

The question is:

What happened, and what reasonable steps had been taken to prevent it?

That is why I found the crowd-control aspect particularly troubling.

There seemed to be very little preparation for the size of the crowds that eventually showed up. And that is exactly what brought about a lot of the conversations we saw online.

Because if there had been some level of orderliness, I don't think nearly as many people would have felt the need to write think pieces about people queuing for chicken.

This is a country that only recently experienced the tragic El-Wak military recruitment stampede, where six potential recruits died, and several others were injured.

And only recently, a Ghanaian-led event in the UK featuring Shatta Wale was shut down after a crowd crush at the entrance left several people injured.

So crowd management is not something we should be taking lightly.

But as the questions of law crossed my mind, underneath all of it I kept thinking about the question that started so many of the conversations on social media.

Why will a promotion for chicken at GH¢15 gather such a large crowd?

Why would I not go?

Am I privileged?

Is it that I don't like chicken?

Am I too ashamed to queue?

What exactly is shameful about queuing for chicken?

Are the people who went poor?

Are they just looking for a cheap deal?

Are they simply trying to make their money stretch a little further?

Or maybe they just really like KFC?

And then I asked myself another question:

If I would not queue for chicken at GH¢15 because of a promotion, would I queue for it at GH¢50 because I genuinely thought it was the best chicken? If I wouldn't queue for chicken, would I queue for something else? That was the thought that eventually caused me to start writing this.

If you know me, then you probably know I don't like waiting for anything.

Even waiting for my destiny helper will annoy me.

I basically treat waiting and queuing as the same thing because I measure them the same way:

You are wasting time.

But I remember when Avengers: Endgame was released.

I queued for hours to get a ticket to watch it at the cinema.

Why?

Because I really wanted to see it.

I am a huge Marvel fan.

If a video of me in my Avengers top standing in that queue had been posted online, I am sure a lot of people would not have understood why anybody would put themselves through that much stress just to watch a fictional movie.

But I understood.

I was willing to queue for this.

And that is where I think the KFC conversation gets interesting.

Black Friday will come in November, and we will probably see a completely different set of queues, involving people from different economic backgrounds.

This time, they may not be queuing for chicken.

They will be queuing for electronic appliances, sneakers, and other discounted products.

When new iPhones and other popular devices are released, we also see people queue for hours to get them.

And somehow, those queues rarely receive the same kind of ridicule.

A lot of people seemed to associate the KFC queues with poverty.

I understand that argument but not entirely.

GH¢15 undoubtedly mattered. For some people, it made something that may ordinarily be out of reach suddenly affordable.

There are people who live close to KFC outlets but have probably never bought anything there. Not because they don't know what KFC is, but because they simply cannot justify spending that much on fast food.

So when the price drops to GH¢15 for one day, they go.

They finally get to taste the thing everyone has been talking about.

Then there are people who can comfortably afford KFC on a regular day but simply saw an opportunity to get it cheaper.

And then there are those who probably saw the promotion as an opportunity to maximise the bargain. They queued, bought what they could, went back and joined the queue again.

That is human nature too. We like bargains. We like feeling that we got something for less than everyone else. So perhaps the problem with trying to explain the KFC queue is that there was never one type of person in that queue. There were different people with different motivations. And that is why I think reducing the entire thing to poverty is too simplistic.

KFC has built a brand around chicken that makes it feel like more than just food. It has become something people aspire to eat.

You have some extra money in your pocket, your birthday comes, you graduate, you get paid, and you tell yourself:

“Ohw, let me go and buy KFC. Let me enjoy myself small.”

That, to me, is the sense of aspiration the brand has created.

Just as some people aspire to own an iPhone 17 or a Tesla, there are people who aspire to eat KFC.

Food, according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is a basic physiological need. So when we see people putting themselves through hours of stress to get food, especially fast food, it is easy to look at the situation and immediately associate it with poverty.

But I think that explanation is a little too easy.

Perhaps what we were seeing was not only the desire to satisfy a basic need, but also the desire to consume something that has been successfully marketed as an experience, a treat and, in some ways, a status symbol.

And that is where the conversation becomes more complicated than simply saying, “They queued because they were poor.”

If we are going to talk about poverty, perhaps we should also talk about aspiration, consumerism and the power of branding.

Because sometimes, people are not simply buying what they need. They are buying what they have been taught to desire.

And that is not unique to KFC.

We all do it.

There is probably a nice chicken vendor in your area who sells really tasty chicken, but you might still choose KFC because there is something attached to the brand.

Maybe it is the taste.

Maybe it is the experience.

Maybe it is the status.

Maybe it is simply because you like KFC.

Whatever the reason, it shows that people do not always make purchasing decisions based purely on necessity.

And maybe that is the real problem with the conversation around the queues.

We were trying to explain a very diverse group of people with one explanation.

Some were there because GH¢15 was affordable.

Some were there because they loved KFC.

Some were there because they wanted to experience it for the first time.

Some were simply there because they saw a bargain and wanted to take advantage of it.

And some probably just wanted chicken.

There was never going to be one explanation for all of them.

Which brings me back to my question:

WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO QUEUE FOR?

You might not be willing to queue for chicken at a promotional price of GH¢15.

But you might queue for a makeup shop offering you a huge discount.

You might queue for a football jersey shop offering 70% off authentic shirts.

You might queue for a new iPhone.

You might queue for a concert.

You might queue for a job interview.

You might queue for a visa.

You might queue for something that, to another person, is completely unnecessary.

And that is the point.

We all have something we are willing to queue for.

Yours might not be chicken.

But there is definitely something you are willing to stand in line for.

So before we laugh at the person standing in a queue and ask:

“Why are you wasting your time?”

Maybe we should first ask ourselves:

“What would make me willing to waste mine?”