The archive · Small Business & Money · Strategic decision · 2012–2025
Same Ole Line Dudes sells standing in line — iPhone drops to court seats
Robert Samuel's NYC crew earns $25–$37.50 an hour holding spots in line — 45 workers across iPhone drops, cronut crazes, sample sales and trials.
Same Ole Line Dudes
What it had to solve
In 2012 Robert Samuel, then an AT&T sales representative, was going to miss a commission check because of the timing of the iPhone 5 release. He posted a Craigslist ad offering to wait in line for a buyer; when the client ordered online at the last moment, Samuel sold the spot for $100 and walked away with $300 that day.
How it works
Same Ole Line Dudes started as a single Craigslist ad. In 2012 Robert Samuel, a sales representative at AT&T, was about to miss a commission check because of the iPhone 5 release, so he offered to wait in line for a buyer. When the client switched to an online order at the front of the queue, Samuel sold the spot to someone else for $100 — and made $300 on the sidewalk that day.
The business he built sells waiting itself. Clients pay $25 to $37.50 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, for someone to hold a spot or pick up goods — whether for a cronut craze, a Supreme drop, Broadway tickets, a sample sale or a criminal-trial seat for a news outlet. Samuel priced the friction: $3 an hour for weather, $15 for overnight jobs, $20 for same-day requests, and about 1.5 times the rate during holiday or hype-drop seasons.
Samuel ran it solo for nine months, then hired workers when 2013 coverage of the cronut craze brought a steady flow of orders. By 2025 the roster was around 45 people, the crew had worked the Sam Bankman-Fried, Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump court cases in New York, flown to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway meeting in Omaha, and drawn clients from around the world.
Why it lands
- Everyone hates waiting, yet the queue is unavoidable for the hottest products — a service that absorbs the wait for money turns a universal complaint into inventory.
- Surge pricing for weather, overnight hours and same-day requests makes the 'boring' job pay like a real trade.
- Starting from a $100 single transaction let Samuel prove demand with one sidewalk sale before building a crew.
- Media moments — the cronut craze, celebrity trials — kept feeding him new categories of line, so the business never depended on one event.
What it did
After media coverage of the 2013 cronut craze brought enough orders to hire workers, the roster grew to about 45. By 2025 the crew had held lines for the Sam Bankman-Fried, Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump New York cases, flown to Omaha for a Berkshire Hathaway meeting, and taken bookings from clients around the world.
What you can take
Treat the friction everyone complains about as a product: name the pain, price its edge cases (weather, nights, urgency), and standing still becomes a scalable service.
Since then
Same Ole Line Dudes grew from a one-man Craigslist act into a roughly 45-person crew by 2025, with employees earning up to $40 an hour, international clients, court-seat bookings and even a flight to Omaha for Berkshire's shareholder meeting. Samuel's advice to would-be hustlers is to listen for complaints and price the solution. The idea also spread: line-sitters on Taskrabbit advertise similar waits from about $20 to over $40 an hour, showing the service had become a recognized gig category rather than a one-off curiosity.
Sources
- This Gen Xer charges $38 an hour to wait in line—including for the Diddy trial and sample sales. Now he's made a business empire out of standing around all day
- 'The Same Ole Line Dudes' Is A Business That Stands On Any Line For Less Than $40 An Hour
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