MR. NEXT.(Bill Jones makes the new lines new at Whole Foods Market in Chelsea, New York City)

When Bill Jones retired and moved from Philadelphia to Union City, New Jersey, a few years ago, he had no friends nearby, and although he was not lonely, he observed that his social life consisted chiefly of being stopped on the street by strangers who said, "Excuse me, sir, but did you know you look exactly like Ed Bradley, from '60 Minutes'?"

And so on a whim Jones, a broad-shouldered and shaved-headed man in his late sixties, who has worked as a talk-radio host, a television anchorman, and a freelance photographer, decided to respond to a "Now Hiring" sign in the window of Whole Foods Market, on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea. That was how, on a recent busy evening, he came to be standing at the head of a line of admiring grocery shoppers, relishing his role as a local landmark, and crying out "Seven is ready!" in a huge, game-show voice that new visitors to the store study in vain for ironic undercurrents.

At Jones's instruction, the customer at the head of the line pushed her cart toward cashier No. 7. Jones boomed out to the next customer, "Twelve is ready!" Then, "Twenty-two is yours!" And so on. Jones, the market's chief "line director" (none of the other hundred and forty stores in the Whole Foods chain have such a position), later explained, "I do two 'ready's and then one 'is yours.' But sometimes I'll play around with it. Someone will say, 'Listen, I've got my boyfriend with me, can you give me an "is yours"?' And I'll break the sequence, and they're happy, and I think, Life is good that this can bring joy."

The history of American queuing has a simple outline. First there were hordes with sticks, then there were lines, and then, in the early nineteen-eighties, thanks in part to visionary thinking at the Columbus, Ohio, headquarters of Wendy's (and initiatives at American Airlines and Chemical Bank, among others), customers began to be asked to form lines that the trade usually describes as "serpentine": they snaked back on themselves, and the person at the head of the snake stepped up to the next available cashier or teller. This system was plainly fairer: no one who arrived after you would be served before you. It removed most fear and doubt from the queue calculus, leaving only impatience and anger; and in almost every place where it could be adopted it was.

But supermarkets did not join the revolution. Serpentine lines require a big block of dedicated floor space. "In supermarkets, the real estate is just too valuable," said Dick Larson, a professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T., whose friends call him Dr. Queue. "If anyone can solve the supermarket queuing problem--the way banks and airlines have done--that person will become rich and famous."

Two years ago, the designers of Manhattan's Whole Foods Market were presented with an awkward floor plan that did not lend itself to the usual broad battalion of cash registers. The decision was made to arrange ...