There is a queue at the best chicken stall, and the queue has a constitution that no one wrote down. As far as I can reconstruct it after six months of careful observation: daily aunties outrank weekly aunties; regulars of fifteen years outrank regulars of ten; anyone buying for the void-deck wedding gets a separate line that everyone pretends not to see.
I cut the queue once, once, to get back before a meeting. The seller's silence for my four hundred grams of chicken was the loudest reprimand of my year. Since then I arrive at 7:10, stand in the correct place, greet the correct people, and my chicken comes back with an extra neck. Neck economics is real.
The chicken itself is soy sauce steamed on Mondays and the queue is worth every minute of it. The constitution, I have decided, is load-bearing. Without it there would only be anarchy and cold chicken.