There's a customer you'll never meet. She drove past your restaurant on a Saturday night, saw people standing near the entrance, and kept driving. She didn't check how long the wait was. She didn't ask. She made a split-second decision based on a prediction: it's going to be a bad experience. So she went somewhere else, or she went home. You'll never know she existed, and she'll never know your wait was only twelve minutes.
This behavior has a name in psychology: anticipated regret. Zeelenberg, van Dijk, and Manstead (1999) at Tilburg University established the foundational theory: when people anticipate feeling regret if a chosen action leads to a poor outcome, they alter their decisions to avoid that regret entirely. Rather than risk a bad experience, they choose inaction — the safe option, the status quo. In dining terms: they don't try the restaurant.
A 2023 meta-analysis by Han, Quadflieg, and Ludwig, published in PLoS One, quantified this effect. Across multiple studies, status-quo preservation — choosing not to act — significantly reduced experienced regret (Hedges' g = -0.45, p = 0.006). In plain language: people who avoided a potentially bad experience felt measurably better than those who took the risk and encountered one. Our brains learn this pattern and apply it ruthlessly to future decisions. One bad wait at one restaurant can make someone avoid walk-ins for months.
The numbers reveal the scale of this invisible loss. Waitwhile's 2024 consumer survey found that 40% of consumers actively avoid businesses with visible lines. Toast's 2025 data shows that 44% of potential diners find a restaurant less appealing and stop trying to book when the process feels difficult. Bonga's field study at a restaurant found a 69% balking rate — meaning more than two-thirds of potential customers turned away at the sight of a queue.
Jang, Cho, and Kim (2013) published in the Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing that both regret and disappointment are significant predictors of switching behavior and negative word-of-mouth. A customer who endured a bad wait doesn't just avoid your restaurant — they actively steer friends and family away. Jiang and Lau (2022) confirmed in Frontiers in Psychology that negative anticipated emotions directly reduce dining-out intention, with perceived threat amplifying the effect.
This creates a paradox for popular walk-in restaurants: success breeds visible queues, which repel the very customers who would contribute to future success. De Vries, Roy, and De Koster's landmark 2018 study in the Journal of Operations Management analyzed 94,404 restaurant visits and estimated that eliminating wait-related effects could increase total revenue by approximately 15%. But the real number may be higher — their dataset only captured customers who actually entered. The anticipated-regret customers, the ones who drove past, are invisible to any on-site measurement.
The solution isn't to eliminate waits — it's to eliminate the visible uncertainty. Toast's data shows that 45% of diners are more likely to eat at a restaurant that offers an online waitlist. Waitwhile found that 52% of consumers prefer virtual queues over physical lines. When a restaurant offers the ability to join a queue remotely — scanning a QR code from outside, checking wait times before arriving, receiving a notification when the table is ready — the anticipated-regret calculation changes entirely. The question shifts from will this be a bad experience to is a 20-minute wait worth it for this restaurant.
That second question has a much better answer for restaurants. Because when the wait is known, quantified, and manageable, most people say yes.