First Come First Serve.
This case, small and straightforward, summarizes a highly complex concept of social contracting. It is a fundamental operational framework in every facet of human interaction, and it pulls order out of the chaos in our everyday activities. This order and management of expectation, the ‘First Come First Serve‘ (FCFS) principle, order, and fairness, goes a long way to ensure fairness in society, legally, and otherwise. Order and fairness help define society’s moral compass. The article aims to provide an analytical review of the principles of social justice and social fairness in the global context.
The Foundational Fairness: Why We Instinctively Trust FCFS
The brutally impartial nature of FCFS is what makes it appealing at its core. This rule, in its purest form, is blind to wealth, power, status, and identity. It only sees one single, solitary metric: time of arrival. This fairness provides an easily understood and universally accepted framework that is transparent and agreed to by all potential participants prior to any competition commencing. It is as fair as it gets—no hidden rules, no subjective fair judgment; only the chronologically unambiguous fact of who got here first.
Such transparency is why we consider queuing and lining to be a fair way to manage demand. Whether one is waiting for a table at a busy restaurant, lining up to board a plane, or waiting for a turn at the department. In motor vehicles, a queue serves as a physical reminder of the first-come, first-served principle. It offers reassurance in the queue; one can visualize their place and see all those in front, in the trust that the fair order will be maintained. This system eliminates the “law of the jungle” scenario in which the most aggressive or well-connected winners win all, and provides an orderly, civilized alternative.
Psychologically, this impact is immensely positive. It alleviates stress and discord by having the rules be abstract. When participants consent to the norm, the decision-making weight is removed. The barista does not have to determine which customer is more valued; the rule does the work for them. This effectiveness and perceived equity are the reasons FCFS has been foundational to trade and societal structuring for centuries, and is a socially emergent mechanism of people.
The Digital Transformation: FCFS in the Online Arena
The digital era has not made FCFS antiquated; it has enhanced the concept and made it more sophisticated. The physical queue has been replaced with a virtual waiting room, a timestamp, and a server request. The fundamental idea remains the same, but scope and velocity have improved to be instantaneous and global.
The most precise instance of such an event includes e-commerce-related services. On certain days, such as Black Friday or when a product drops, websites experience an innumerable amount of user traffic all at once. This leads to enormous pressure on the site, as hundreds of users are pressing “checkout” and “purchase” buttons simultaneously. An invisible ‘line’ of customers, as in the FCFS queuing model, is created on site and managed by invisible “servers” in the website’s backend. This concept applies to online ticket sales for concerts and sporting events, to users booking government services, and to university students registering for courses online.
The digital world or FCFS has weaknesses as well. The biggest and most popular issue is the phenomenon of automated “bots”, software that does tasks at a rate thousands of times faster than a regular human. This allows them to skip to the front of the virtual line, a phenomenon that is very harmful to the FCFS model. This is especially evident in markets for products bought and resold at a higher markup, such as popular and limited-edition sneakers, follow-gen video game systems, and high-demand, high-performance graphics cards, where bots get all the stock in an instant. The issue is that most of the time, only those with the fastest technology can get to the front of the line, while others sit and wait.
To counter the challenges posed by FCFS being exploited by bots and ticket scalpers, companies are implementing more complex systems. One example of this is “randomized queueing,” in which a user’s position in the queue is assigned at random to combat bot use for ticketing. Another example is “verified fan” systems that aim to identify and prioritize actual fans in concert ticket queues over scalpers. These systems highlight the lengths to which companies must go to maintain the underlying fairness of first-come, first-served systems.
The Limits of Linearity: When First Come, First Served Fails
The FCFS model is not a panacea. Its zero-sum, linear approach is inflexible. Within the wrong frameworks, it can produce outcomes that are grossly inefficient and even unethical, particularly given who and what are left out in the model’s application. It is, in a value, need, and urgency sense, dead.
One example set is in healthcare ERs. This is an area where strict FCFS (first-come-first-served) would be disastrous, such as letting the person with the sprained ankle go before the one with the heart attack. This is why the idea of triage exists: it is a system of prioritization that purposefully ignores FCFS because of the nature of medical needs’ severity and urgency. It is an acknowledgement that, given critically scarce life resources, a more complex, needs-based form of justice is required.
Another example is the allocation of critically scarce life-saving resources, such as donor organs or ventilators, during a pandemic. Even within the framework of FCFS, it would be morally unjustifiable to give a liver to the person first in line, the one with the highest wait time, if the next person in line were a better medical match. Medical criteria, compatibility scores, and predictions of the patient’s long-term Survival are required to build a prioritization list. This demonstrates that while FCFS is excellent for distributing discretionary goods and services, it fails profoundly when basic human needs and rights are at stake.
A pure First Come First Serve system is also unfair from the perspective of opportunity. Does the most qualified candidate for a given position lose out simply because somebody applied before them? Does a university lose out on the best candidate for a program simply because they submitted their application the instant the application appeared on the web portal? Society has largely answered this question with a “no”. A system that allocates opportunities based on merit is, despite its shortcomings, fairer. It seeks to allocate scarce opportunities (jobs, education) to the most qualified, rather than the most prompt.
What is the Future of the Queue? Fair Plus Smart.
What is the future of “First Come First Served”? It is here to stay. It is simple and, most importantly, people perceive it to be fair. These characteristics ensure its dominance across a wide range of situations. These interactions involve waiting one’s turn, a skill we learn as children and that remains a fundamental part of social interactions.
Nonetheless, the future hinges on smart implementation. We are entering an era in which FCFS is no longer the only item in the toolkit, but rather one of many. The most optimal systems will be able to assess and evaluate in real time whether FCFS is the most appropriate mechanism and when it ought to be augmented and/or substituted with other principles, such as Triage, Meritocracy, or even a Lottery.
To illustrate, a Customer Service System may implement FCFS to handle general inquiries, but may also escalate a call involving a service outage (impact prioritization). A booking platform may also use FCFS for general bookings, but in some instances may grant preferential booking access to loyal repeat customers (a hybrid model).
Conclusion
While first-come, first-served seems simple at first, it bears the mark of an advanced civilization. We have an innate trust in it because it seems fair, it solves problems, and it maintains order in the face of chaos. Yet, as this article shows, the blind spot to everything but order in the queue is both the system’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. An advanced and truly fair civilization does not abandon first-come, first-served, but one that knows exactly when to apply it, when to modify it in the system of order, and when to shift to a completely different system of requirements higher on the order of justice. It is, and should be, the default system of order in fairness, but civilization has the potential to self-regulate the system to optimize it. That is true civilization.
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