Size up the queues with a quick Shnergle

Bored with waiting in line? Tired of ending up in the wrong crowd? A new app could be your saviour

In bars across the city, battle lines are drawn. One group stands obnoxiously close to another and eyeballs them pointedly until the occupiers quiver and abandon their coveted table. Others don’t even make it through the door: they find the place heaving with students, or discover the queue is out into the street and/or it costs £20 to get in. Huffing and puffing ensues.

Could Shnergle change your life? The app, released on iTunes in mid-August, is a hybrid of Foursquare, Twitter and Instagram with a hyper-local focus: in its early weeks, it’s concentrated specifically in Shoreditch. Users “check in” and (anonymously) upload photos of venues, creating a library of real-time images so you can assess if the queues are too long or the crowd too ugly/young/hipster/City thug. Images are time-stamped to allow users to predict the venue according to what it looked like last week. Pictures remain in the system for eight days.

“Londoners don’t like queuing,” observes Rob Tregaskes, co-founder and CEO of Shnergle. “That’s one of the reasons the app is honed in on photos: the one thing that’s completely universal is letting your own eyes make the decision. You can see if it’s your sort of people in real time.”

It’s easy to use: the homescreen is an “around me” view showing you your location with a radius of roughly 1km but you can expand the map to change the size of the search radius. A menu bar allows you to search for places by name or find promotions. Shnergle is working with merchants in Shoreditch who will create drinks deals to incentivise people to download the app. It currently has several hundred users. Tregaskes and his co-founder Johnny Bull are ex-Army officers: Shnergle is army slang for “recce”.

The crowd-sourcing element is part of a growing trend of apps to beat the queue, such as Q-App, which launched over the summer. Instead of standing at the bar, you can order and pay for drinks on your phone. You’ll receive a code and then be notified when your drinks are ready — just take the code up to the bar to collect your drinks. It’s attracted big money: investors include Alex Chesterman (founder of Zoopla and co-founder of LOVEFiLM), Paul Ettinger (co-founder of Caffè Nero) and Ed Martin (co-founder of London pub and bar chain ETM Group). The app also works for restaurants, theatres and cinemas.

“We think Shnergle will work really well for winter,” says Tregaskes, “the attitude being, ‘I’m not going outside unless I know I’m going somewhere interesting’.” The name may be a tad embarrassing (would you ever willingly say, “shall we Shnergle it?”) but the idea capitalises on laziness and a natural aversion to plummeting temperatures, and if it succeeds it could be driven by FOMO. Convinced? Come on: vive la queue revolution.

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