Openings at Swiss railway station counters

Have you ever pondered about the problem of getting your turn as a customer waiting to be served? Take, for instance, a crowded market stand with yourself longing to buy some radish (without being puzzled by the ancient origins of the name Rettich – cf. Wolfgang Behr’s sophisticated account in his blog) or a railway station counter hall in which you find yourself together with others hurrying to get a ticket for a train ready to leave in a few minutes. Imagining such a situation, you will certainly know that it doesn’t suffice to be a customer waiting to be served but that it is required to make yourself visible and accountable as a waiting and possible next client (and, eventually, as an urgently next client). Otherwise, others might forestall you and it will never be your turn.

Zurich main station: map of the hall

It was not before we started to analyze conversational openings at Swiss railway station counters that we became interested in a client’s social status as a possible client (by entering the station), a waiting client (by queuing in front of a counter), a next client (by getting to the front of the queue), an imminent client (while leaving the queue and approaching the counter), and, finally, a current client (by reaching the counter). Especially, the transition from next to imminent and current client grabbed our attention since it is within this transition that the social interaction between the mobile customer and the stationary officer (behind the counter) actually seems to start, i.e. some moments before the first words are exchanged at the counter. At least, we have tried to provide some nice evidence from our video data of different counter settings with physical queuing vs. ticket machine and counters with/out window pane (in Basel, Geneva, Lugano, and Zurch) to document and to study this transition.

From this point of view, getting your turn appears to be an achievement depending on a variety of factors among which are the behavioral conduct (such as behaving as a next client), the situational setting that might include physical provisions (such as built and designed affordances) for this very problem and might accordingly support the participants to behave as next clients, and, last but not least, the social expectability of normative references to the social organization of who comes next (such as first come, first served).

Get interested in more details? You will find more information about openings at Swiss Railway counters in the new Spur Working Paper (H. Hausendorf, L. Mondada: Becoming the current client. A study of openings at Swiss railway station counters. Zurich: URPP Language and Space Working Papers 2017).