Stacze kolejkowi (Poland)
| Stacze kolejkowi 🇵🇱 | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
||
| Location: Poland | ||
| Definition: Individuals who queue for someone else as a means of generating income | ||
| Keywords: Poland – CEE – EU – Europe – Shortage – Employment – Access – Rule-bending – Network – Personal connections – Kinship – Scheme – Opportunity – Money | ||
| Clusters: Market – Gaming the system | ||
| Author: Nikolaos Olma | ||
| Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany | ||
| Website: Profile page at MPG | ||
By Nikolaos Olma, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
| In socialist-era Poland, stacze kolejkowi (singular: stacz kolejkowy) were individuals who, amidst the severe shortages of consumer goods that plagued the country in the 1980s, stood in the queue for someone else as a means of generating income ‘on the side’ (na lewo). Even though the term literally translates as ‘queue standers’, the fact that stacze kolejkowi queued for monetary profit largely differentiated them from other ‘queuers’ (kolejkowicze or ogonkowicze), who queued to buy a product for either personal use or bartering. The practice is one of many informal structures and arrangements that facilitated the population’s provision with consumer goods by filling ‘the gray zone between state socialism and the grassroots market economy’ (Mazurek 2012: 299). While the collapse of the socialist regime and the transition to market economy resulted in the term falling out of use, the mid-2000s saw its revival, as some individuals began to earn a living by queuing for a fee at box offices, hospitals, state agencies, and banks. Outside modern Poland, a similar practice has been recorded in Russia, where those working in this informal line of business are known as tramitadory (singular: tramitador), and in Italy, where the profession of a line-stander – or codista (plural: codisti) – is a legally recognised one. |
.jpg)
To a certain extent, shortages of consumer goods and queues as a key allocation mechanism in the shortage economy resulted from structural flaws embedded in socialist-era central planning (Kornai 1980). Accordingly, they were experienced across the entire Eastern bloc. For example, in the late socialist era, Soviet consumers spent between 30 and 40 billion hours a year in aggregate queuing for food and other necessities (Larson 1987: 899, Schwartz 1974: 841). This made physical queuing in the Soviet Union ‘an inescapable quotidian ritual, a waste of time, and a source of irritation’ (Bogdanov 2012: 77). Additionally, consumers throughout the bloc were also habitually registered on one or more waiting lists for larger and more valuable commodities, such as cars, apartments, telephone lines, or free vacations. Despite the ideological claims of the advanced nature of socialism, the socialist states were unable to produce and allocate resources without queues. Rather, they demonstrated their power by means of a ‘dictatorship over needs’ (Fehér, Heller, and Markus 1986) and by immobilising citizens and seizing their time (Verdery 1996: 39-57). Hence, in order to save time and reclaim it from the state, consumers resorted to the informal economy. This phenomenon laid the ground for the emergence of queue standers in Poland as well as in the Soviet Union, where they were referred to as stoial’shchiki" (singular: stoial’shchik), a term that is sometimes used for present-day tramitadory as well.
What made the case of socialist-era Poland somewhat different – and hence rendered stacze kolejkowi more popular than their counterparts in other Eastern bloc republics – were the food shortages that came as a result less of systemic flaws and more of the decisions of planners and policymakers (Nørgaard and Sampson 1984). The first signs of a food crisis appeared in 1976, when food prices increased overnight and sugar was rationed. In the early 1980s, the scale of shortages forced the authorities to extend the rationing system to a wide range of basic consumer goods. As food products became increasingly difficult to obtain, consumers formed long queues in front of the otherwise empty shops whenever goods were delivered – or were rumoured to be delivered. In order to maximise their chances of obtaining goods, many arrived several hours before the shops’ official opening time (Burrell 2003: 190; Hraba 1985: 391). Rather than queueing only for things they needed, consumers were always on the lookout for any products they could get hold of, knowing that even if they did not need them personally, they could always use them in barter. Such consumer strategies generated further shortages.
Given that demand was much higher than supply, many consumers attempted to obtain consumer goods out of turn by shortening the wait or by beating the queue. Some deployed creative strategies to enter the shorter separate queues reserved for priority customers – for example, by faking disability and pregnancy or by bringing along little children. Others resorted to the ‘familial society’ (Wedel 1986), which helped them arrange food provision by means of various kinship- and friendship-centred practices (Mazurek 2012). Still others turned to the ‘economy of favours’ (Ledeneva 1998). This means personal ties with shop managers or assistants sped up or facilitated one’s access to particular goods under the counter in return for other goods or services were of paramount importance. Individuals who were not well-connected but did not want to or could not queue could hire a stacz kolejkowy. Even though networks were relatively important to this end as well, stacze kolejkowi could be also found outside shops or already standing in a queue. Indeed, many stacze kolejkowi queued for particularly attractive products without having been hired to do so, only to later sell their position in the queue – or the products acquired – at an inflated price (Zblewski 2000: 76).
Queuing for goods that were particularly difficult to obtain often extended into several hours, and hence the ranks of stacze kolejkowi consisted predominantly of people with ample time on their hands, such as pensioners. For many of them, queueing for someone else was a daily practice that, in those times of uncertainty, supplemented their meagre pensions. Stacze kolejkowi would stand in a queue from early morning until an interested party bought their position in the queue. If the amount obtained was insufficient, they would move either to the end of the same queue or to another queue altogether, where they would stand again to wait for another client. Stacze kolejkowi were also hired ad hoc by individuals who could not skip work on a day that a particularly valuable product became available, or by people unwilling or unable to stand in a queue for appliances, which often stretched over several days. However, not all multi-day queues required constant physical presence, as queuing order was maintained by self-organised ‘queue committees’ (komitety kolejkowe), which kept a ‘social queuing list’ (społeczna lista kolejkowa) onto which all queuers were expected to register. Those registered were allowed to leave the queue but had to be present during roll calls – which took place two to four times a day – as one’s failure to be present at a roll call a given number of times resulted in losing their position.
Since queuers and queueing committees went to great lengths to keep queues orderly, stacze kolejkowi – and the speculation they engaged in – were met with contempt by other queuers. The practice of standing for hours only to sell one’s position in the queue for monetary profit was perceived as a disregard for other queuers, as well as a breach of the queue etiquette and of the ‘first come, first served’ principle. Paradoxically, this reasoning was not usually extended to the other forms of ‘getting things done’ in Poland (załatwianie), which offered access to products and services out of turn and hence deprived those who queued of a fair access to products. What made the practice of stacze kolejkowi reprehensible was that, in a sphere of life governed by the non-market exchange of goods and services, stacze kolejkowi charged money for their queueing and hence supplanted ‘the ethic of the queue (waiting your turn) with the ethic of the market (paying a price for faster service)’ (Sandel 2012: 39).
References
Bogdanov, K. 2012. ‘The Queue as Narrative: A Soviet Case Study’, in A. Baiburin, C. Kelly, and N. Vakhtin (eds), Russian Cultural Anthropology after the Collapse of Communism. London and New York, NY: Routledge: 77-102.
Burrell, K. 2003. ‘The Political and Social Life of Food in Socialist Poland’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 21(1): 189-195.
Fehér, F., Heller, A. and Márkus, G. 1986. Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies. London: Blackwell.
Hraba, J. 1985. ‘Consumer Shortages in Poland: Looking Beyond the Queue into a World of Making Do’, The Sociological Quarterly 26(3): 387-404.
Kornai, J. 1980. Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam and New York, NY: North-Holland.
Larson, R. C. 1987. ‘Perspectives on Queues: Social Justice and the Psychology of Queueing’, Operations Research 35(6): 895-905.
Ledeneva, A. V. 1998. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Mazurek, M. 2012. ‘Keeping It Close to Home: Resourcefulness and Scarcity in Late Socialist and Postsocialist Poland’, in P. Bren and M. Neuberger (eds), Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press: 298-324.
Nørgaard, O. and Sampson, S. L. 1984. ‘Poland’s Crisis and East European Socialism’, Theory and Society 13: 773-801.
Sandel, M. J. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. London: Allen Lane.
Schwartz, B. 1974. ‘Waiting, Exchange, and Power: The Distribution of Time in Social Systems’, American Journal of Sociology 79(4): 841-870.
Verdery, K. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wedel, J. 1986. The Private Poland: An Anthropologist's Look at Everyday Life. New York, NY: Facts on File.
Zblewski, Z. 2000. Leksykon PRL-u. Kraków: Znak.