In May 2022, Sri Lanka's economic crisis produced severe shortages of cooking gas, and thousands queued for gas and petrol in Colombo. Reuters interviewed part-time driver Mohammad Shazly on his third day in line, hoping to obtain a cylinder for his family. About two hundred cylinders had arrived for roughly five hundred people.
What distinguishes this queue is that keeping one's place offered no assurance that supply would last. The gap between the number waiting and the delivery made the shortage immediately visible. Three days in line became part of the cost of securing fuel simply to cook at home.