I think people are taking this to the extreme and talking about what would happen if the queue piles up behind her. But on a less dramatic level, maybe she’s just finishing the page of her book she’s reading, or finishing off writing a long and potentially important text - tasks which you’d rather get done in one go. The gap between her and the next person in queue is small enough that it could’ve happened all in one queue movement, and she’s just not instantly moving - she wants to finish her page.
Having been in queues in airports, the pressure put on you by the people behind you is ridiculous. It feels like if you spend 30 seconds not moving (nowhere near enough time to cause a pileup that spills into the walkable areas) people think you’re crazy, when in reality it just means picking up your bags less and getting to finish reading that task you’re doing
I think something important missing here from the maths is that taking longer to buy the house makes it astronomically more expensive due to compound interest on your mortgage.
A lower wage means you’re more likely to only make minimum payments on your mortgage, and thus spend more money on interest.
On a 30 year mortgage on the average house, 6.73% interest rate (average in 2024), the total repayments come to $996,840, which is 137,500 hours, or 66 years of minimum wage work at 40 hours a week. Sure seems like a problem when that’s longer than the term of the mortgage - at minimum wage you can’t outpace the mortgage rates
Completing the same calculations with a 30 year mortgage in 1974 gives us a house costing a total of $90,457, or 22 years of minimum wage work. Still a little ridiculous, but doable on 2 incomes.