The Jakarta Post reports on a phenomenon found in a number of places: people being paid an hourly wage to wait in line.

Student Ansari Haja has endured bad weather, hunger and the call of nature to stand in line for hours and secure an apartment at Bedok Residences.

The catch – the apartment was not for himself. The 19-year-old was paid $300 last November by a real-estate agent to spend 28 hours in a queue. He did it again a month later, for another showflat launch in Serangoon North – this time queuing for 14 hours…

It appears that apartments, clothing and gadgets top the list of things people will pay others to queue for.

Associate Professor Xiao Hong, from the Nanyang Technological University’s Division of Sociology, said that this practice reflects the affluence of a society that allows one person to buy another’s time.

‘Everyone’s time has a value on it. But because of social-economic factors, others have more value placed on their time. To compensate for a lack of it, they use economic resources to ‘extend’ the hours that they currently have in a day,’ she added.

And Singapore is not alone when it comes to the phenomenon of ‘queue-sitting’.

In Japan, businessmen have paid people to stand in line for the launch of the PlayStation 3, while in Britain, students at Edinburgh University were paid to help secure the best flats on the market.

I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this in the United States. This past Thanksgiving, I stood in line for 45 minutes before midnight at Best Buy and you could see that people were jumpy about things like people joining their friends in line right before the doors opened or not getting in the store even a few minutes after midnight. Would Americans accept the idea of someone in front of them being paid to wait in line and then changing places with the payee at the end?

The concept of paying for extra time is interesting. How is this any different than paying a personal assistant or a personal shopper to take care of certain tasks during the day? If you have the money, you can afford this. Does this suggest that inequalities of wealth can be translated into inequalities of time? People with more money or resources can literally do more each day.