Has waiting in line become its own reward?

It’s a question that many retail experts are asking in light of the queues for Apple’sAAPL +0.07%  new iPhone 5s and 5c models, which go on sale Friday morning. Putting aside that it’s been just a year since Apple released its last iPhone and users may be suffering from upgrade fatigue, there’s the simple fact that the phones can be ordered online and shipped to a buyer’s home—no need to stand outside an Apple store, in other words. But that would ignore the real point, say those who study consumer trends: The shared experience of waiting is part of what’s driving consumer satisfaction, as bewildering as that may seem to anyone who’s wasted the better part of a day standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In this new approach to shopping—call it “queue chic”—time wasted is camaraderie gained.

“Shopping has become a collective event,” says Adam Hanft of Hanft Projects, a New York consulting firm that works with consumer brands.

Hanft and other retail experts say that by standing in a crowd, be it for a smartphone or a Black Friday sale, shoppers see themselves as making the right buying decision—a concept known as “social proof.” And that holds true even in the face of considerable logic to the contrary; a name-brand television, for example, is actually more expensive on Black Friday than on several other holiday-season shopping days, according to a Wall Street Journal study.

It isn’t just consumers who are taking pleasure standing in line: Retailers also recognize the value of keeping shoppers waiting, say experts. That’s because waiting crowds create attention—and that attention can translate into sales even after the initial frenzy has died down.

Of course, there was a time when standing in line had a negative connotation: Just think of all those struggling Soviets during the Cold War era of rationed goods. Conversely, too much product availability—the dilemma of the big-box era of shopping—is probably what’s fueled the queue chic mentality, says Daniel M. Ladik, an associate professor of marketing in the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University.

Ladik argues that if shoppers believe that everything is readily available to them, they’ll get excited only when there’s a sense of scarcity—real or imagined. “I call it the paradox of choice,” says Ladik.

In the case of the new iPhones, there may indeed be a scarcity issue: Reports have already surfaced that the 5s could be in short supply. But if waiting equals buzz, there could be something of an Apple buzz backlash. Consider the television ads that Apple mobile rival Samsung has run in the past for its Galaxy line of smartphones: It’s a campaign built around spoofing the Apple “fanboys” doing what comes naturally to them—waiting in line.

Ladik, an Apple obsessive himself, fully appreciates the joke, but says the queue chic phenomenon isn’t likely to go away. “It’s a community thing,” he says of those lines stretched outside Apple stores. “There’s no other logic to it.”