Yep. No one is going to McDonalds for a delicious burger, just a cheap and fast one. Now that prices are above $10 if you want a meal, and the restaurants are understaffed so even the drive through takes > 15 minutes, there’s really no reason to eat there
drive through just have very low throughput in general, if it takes you 15 minutes to order from drive through, it would be likely to be faster to park your car and walk in for a take out
or some mcdonalds even let you mobile order and pick up on designated spots, they added that because it gets better throughput than drive through.
As someone who worked in an understaffed fast food restaurant for like 3 years… No, going inside doesn’t make your order faster. From my experience, orders get made in chronological order of when they were placed. You may be able to place your order quicker (if you’re lucky there’s enough staff to take an in-store order while there’s people in the drive through) but you will probably still wait about the same since the food can only be made so fast, and the few people have to splits their attention even more.
If it’s a normally staffed restaurant then you might have luck, but usually long wait times in the drive through aren’t because the drive through itself is slow… Excluding the random people who pull up with the good ol’, “can I get a uuuuuhhhhhhh…”
that’s when the app shines. You basically cut the ordering queue, which drive through users cannot avoid at all.
Also even if stuffs are prepared in chronological order, they don’t literally need to fulfill everything in earlier orders before starting to work on the next one. In drive through if someone order something that takes longer to prepare it would clog up the queue that someone might not be able to even start ordering. The lack of parallelism is very visible especially when you do a walk in order and order very few items right after someone who orders a lot, you will often get your order first, despite their orders’ preparation started before yours.
That depends on a lot of factors as well, a lot of fast food isn’t made to order and some can be created ahead of time if you’re expecting a lot of orders to come in. Fries, burger patties, some other fried goods like chicken fingers can be held for a little while without them going bad. There’s always the chance that the people working the kitchen may have had the smaller order on hand but needed to make some fresh things for the larger order.
I mean, the primary benefit of fast food is that you can swing by and get a prepared meal on your lunch break. You can’t really do that at a sit down place unless you order in advance. They lost the ‘fast’ part too, since they don’t want to pay the amount of people it takes to run their stores though. Now the only benefit they have going for them is their hours, and they’re slipping there for the most part, since most places are still running on reduced hours because COVID gave them the excuse to never bring their old hours back.
Fast food is losing the plot. If it isn’t cheap, then there is really no point.
Yep. No one is going to McDonalds for a delicious burger, just a cheap and fast one. Now that prices are above $10 if you want a meal, and the restaurants are understaffed so even the drive through takes > 15 minutes, there’s really no reason to eat there
drive through just have very low throughput in general, if it takes you 15 minutes to order from drive through, it would be likely to be faster to park your car and walk in for a take out
or some mcdonalds even let you mobile order and pick up on designated spots, they added that because it gets better throughput than drive through.
As someone who worked in an understaffed fast food restaurant for like 3 years… No, going inside doesn’t make your order faster. From my experience, orders get made in chronological order of when they were placed. You may be able to place your order quicker (if you’re lucky there’s enough staff to take an in-store order while there’s people in the drive through) but you will probably still wait about the same since the food can only be made so fast, and the few people have to splits their attention even more.
If it’s a normally staffed restaurant then you might have luck, but usually long wait times in the drive through aren’t because the drive through itself is slow… Excluding the random people who pull up with the good ol’, “can I get a uuuuuhhhhhhh…”
that’s when the app shines. You basically cut the ordering queue, which drive through users cannot avoid at all.
Also even if stuffs are prepared in chronological order, they don’t literally need to fulfill everything in earlier orders before starting to work on the next one. In drive through if someone order something that takes longer to prepare it would clog up the queue that someone might not be able to even start ordering. The lack of parallelism is very visible especially when you do a walk in order and order very few items right after someone who orders a lot, you will often get your order first, despite their orders’ preparation started before yours.
That depends on a lot of factors as well, a lot of fast food isn’t made to order and some can be created ahead of time if you’re expecting a lot of orders to come in. Fries, burger patties, some other fried goods like chicken fingers can be held for a little while without them going bad. There’s always the chance that the people working the kitchen may have had the smaller order on hand but needed to make some fresh things for the larger order.
I mean, the primary benefit of fast food is that you can swing by and get a prepared meal on your lunch break. You can’t really do that at a sit down place unless you order in advance. They lost the ‘fast’ part too, since they don’t want to pay the amount of people it takes to run their stores though. Now the only benefit they have going for them is their hours, and they’re slipping there for the most part, since most places are still running on reduced hours because COVID gave them the excuse to never bring their old hours back.
Also people really like that you know exactly what you’re getting no matter where you are if you need a quick bite.