During the gruelling lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, my husband and I took meandering walks around our suburb. In one such walk, in a pocket of the inner north that we had never before come across, we found a long line curling beside a riverbank.

It was a glorious sight to behold in dark times and we assumed that some hot, new, takeaway-only cafe had opened. We joined the queue, admiring the moxie of opening a cafe mid-lockdown. It was only 15 minutes or so later that it occurred to us we should check what the deal was, and discovered we were, in fact, in a line for the only thing an entrepreneur should have been betting on in the early days of the pandemic: walk-through COVID testing.

On the one hand, lining up filled in a bit of time in an otherwise empty day/week/month; on the other, it was a cautionary tale, a reminder of one of the only true rules in life: in a developed economy there is nothing worth waiting in line for. Ever.

So, with that in mind, let’s talk about the insanity of queuing for frozen yoghurt – which is a thing that happens both regularly and earnestly.

Froyo is one of those grotesqueries that has been around since millennials were babies and Donald Trump was a joke on himself rather than the rest of humanity. The concept is inoffensive enough – the coldness, the sweetness, the treat-y-ness of ice cream but with the (alleged) healthiness of yoghurt.

There are definitely some good things about it. Froyo offers control over serving size and thus liberation from the 15-year-old employees at the ice-cream shops with their tiny teenager wrists who do not have the strength for adequate portions. And the shops are pretty much always self-serve, which means very limited and shame-free interactions with actual real people – just that one kid at the end who tells you how much it all is. (And soon, very soon, even that one kid will be obsolete.)

There is also something very gratifying about creating your own coils of multi-hued dairy slime and bedecking said monstrosity in colourful fruit, shards of chocolate, crumbed nuts and popcorn (none of which go together thematically). Further, the inclusion of fruit gives the impression of, if not health, then at least wellness. It is eating the rainbow if the rainbow had brownie in it.

However, for every concept that sounds charming in theory, there is of course the unforgiving reality. As with communism and music festivals, it only takes the general public to make something unworkable. Because while froyo takes portion control and puts it in the hands of the consumer (that’s good!), the consumer is a disgusting, germ-covered menace (that’s bad!).