They don’t lie. Why would you lie to say that it’s a 2.5 hour wait? That’s going to make people go elsewhere. A good host/hostess can look at the tables, how long they’ve been there, and get a pretty good estimate of how long the wait will be. They’re also not going to leave tables empty just to make the workload easier. They do usually overestimate. But it’s not lying. It’s saying “I’m 100% sure that we can have you at a table in X amount of time.”