Before Lunar New Year in February 2015, not everyone in the long line at Lim Chee Guan’s Singapore flagship intended to eat the bak kwa they were buying. The Straits Times reported a photograph taken at 2:42 a.m. showing seven Indian workers sleeping outside the New Bridge Road shop. The next morning, a Chinese-language newspaper found three foreign workers among hundreds in the queue; one said his employer had instructed him to buy twenty kilograms of barbecued meat. The seasonal price was S$52 per kilogram, and the shop said four workers had purchased 320 kilograms between them a few days earlier. Scarcity had not eliminated the queue. Instead, employers transferred the physical labour of waiting to people whose working time they controlled. This was a proxy queue shaped as much by employment relations as by festive demand.