In August 2024, a long Mid-Autumn Festival queue formed outside a popular pastry shop in Changhua, Taiwan, for egg-yolk pastries. Formosa TV reported that a two-box-per-person limit led one proxy-buying operator to recruit roughly fifty or sixty people to stand in line. Arguments also broke out when chairs were used to reserve places without bodies present.
A per-person cap is designed to spread scarce goods among more buyers. Yet adding more people multiplies the amount one group can obtain. A rule based on counting individuals therefore became a contest over how many bodies could be mobilized into the queue.