Night Markets and Network Effects

You choose a queue at a pasar malam without tasting anything. You just look at the line.

The martabak stall with twelve people feels safer than the empty one with nicer signage. That is not taste. That is a network effect: value grows because others have already chosen it.

For a while I thought this was a bug in human judgment. Now I think it is the feature. Trust is expensive to compute, so we outsource it to the crowd.

What a good stall does with this

• Make the queue legible. Price board big, motions visible. People need to see what they would be joining.
• Keep a signature that photographs badly. If everyone takes the same photo, the queue markets itself.

We build product queues the same way — waitlists, social proof, open counters. The stall that understands it is selling membership, not just martabak, wins the night.

Pop by Blok M this weekend and count queues. You will see the pattern before you taste it.