• 15 Jun 2020
• 2 Min read

How far Britain’s virtual shopping queues would stretch

• by Rachel Handley

As many of Britain’s high-street stores reopen their doors, we’ve imagined how long the socially distanced queues for your favourite shopping websites would be.

If daily traffic was represented by people in a line (two metres apart, of course), Primark’s queue could fill its huge Birmingham store 3,719 times over.

Here’s how some of more of your favourite shops would measure up:

• Greggs’ queue would be as long as 240,444 sausage rolls

CC 4.0, Rerrj at English Wikipedia

• Asos’ queue would reach from Land’s End to John o’ Groats

• Sports Direct’s queue would be the length of 4,593 football pitches

• Ikea’s queue would be the same length as 435,644 Billy bookcases

© Ikea

• Currys’ queue would be as long as 1.3 million washing machines side-by-side

• Waterstones’ queue would be equivalent to a stack of 2.3 million copies of War And Peace

• Boots’ queue would be as long as almost 5 million toothbrushes

• Halfords’ queue would be as long as around 250,000 bicycles

• John Lewis’ queue would go from London to Newcastle upon Tyne and back

• Amazon’s queue length would be over 40,590 times The Shard’s height

Virtual queues compared

• Amazon UK = 7,810 miles
• Asos = 891 miles
• John Lewis = 617 miles
• Ikea = 563 miles
• Boots = 547 miles
• Currys = 501 miles
• Halfords = 269 miles
• Sports Direct = 257 miles
• Primark = 157 miles
• Waterstones = 83 miles
• Greggs = 22 miles

You can find the full data used for these calculations here.

Rachel Handley