Why, when I’m in the drive thru after had just placed my order, am I told to drive up and wait for them to run out and give me my order?
Especially, when nobody is behind me?
It’s a fast food joint, the drive through should be used for quick orders and convenience.
I don’t remember this being the norm ten years ago. Now, it seems every other time I try the drive through, especially at Burger King, I have to drive up and wait.
These days, I just go inside.
Is the food not prepared fast enough? Not enough employees to cover the work? What has changed that this now seems to be more common than ever?
The only times that happened to me was when I ordered something other than what they mass-produced for the lunch rush. For example, remember when McD’s had pizzas on their menu? Every time I ordered one through the drive-through I had to pull into the special parking spot and wait.
Maybe once or twice it happened on a normal order. Could be that someone before me or inside had just placed a massive order, like 20 Big Macs for the team or something, and they were running just a little behind.
Most fast food drive-ins have an automatic system that records how long the person ordering had to wait for their food. The team can get reamed if the wait numbers are too high. The timer stops when the car drives away from the window. Therefore even if there’s no one behind you, they have a motivation for wanting your car away from the window if there’s going to be a long wait. One long wait can screw up what was otherwise a decent average wait time.
Ah… now that makes sense. Seems counter productive to bypass the performance system. Because now their management doesn’t know that I really had to wait longer then what ever performance numbers they’re looking for. I would think they have this system to 1; monitor average times to get customers through quickly. And 2, improve on inefficiencies in the drive thru. If bypassed, one can assume the problems will remain.
Great, now I know what do when this happens again. I guess I’ll send a friendly letter to the store management that I’m getting tossed off the line in favor of employees cheating the performance system. Not that I want employees to get in trouble, but what the hell. This is way too common and makes the drive-thru more of a hassle and inconvenient. One BK in particular in Glenview, I went there often one summer, and the average wait was 15 minutes, that’s no exaggeration. It was common that 3 or 4 cars are parked after getting out of line waiting for a server to run out the food. Glad I don’t have to go there anymore.
All I usually get is something off the dollar menu at these places, nothing special otherwise. I would think those items falls under normal mass produced lunch items.
But, I totally understand if someone ordered way more than average, yes, that person should be told to pull ahead and wait (and should have gone inside really). But ouside of that, I’m told to pull ahead for simple orders, without heavy drive thru volume. And that practice needs to stop.
I worked in a McD’s drive through for six months straight. The biggest problems we have with wait time happen when drive through runners bump orders off too fast and then have to figure out what orders go where. It was seriously annoying for me because the customers would get held up and my wait times would look bad because someone else down the line screwed up (I worked the register).
When you go when the restaurant isn’t busy, any number of things can happen that will delay a drive through order. One, they could be out of food because all the food they prepared at the last rush has gone bad. Or two, the management might purposely schedule their less efficient workers/trainees for their slow hours because less productivity is needed then. Since those workers aren’t very fast, food gets delayed.
It’s a pain if you like something odd on the menu and have friends with the same. EASIEST way to hold up a mcDonald’s line- take a friend and go and order 5 fish sandwiches. You WILL have to wait an extra 5-10 mins since they only seem to have 1-2 and some times their fryers will be so busy they can only make 2-3 fish fillets at a time. It’s great when they don’t ask you to pull around then
20% of the food orders cause 80% of the delays: Rarely ordered items, custom made items, or items in great quantity. My ex ordered oddball combos, rarely-eaten items and then always got pissed when she had to wait. I kept telling her they were not going to shift a business model that services 80% of the people with the true spirit of fast food for the 20% who can’t be serviced because their orders are too unique.
Food service is not a system or platform that can run at 99.5% service levels. It has to be built around traffic (people arrival patterns), and the patterns and problems associated with that traffic. And getting to an 80% service level is damn good. The only solution to make it better is to stock more prepared food items (absorb more losses when it sits/wastes and watch quality suffer) or hire more staff than you need for most of the day, which results in higher prices and less business and poor worker utilization.
For 15-20 bucks, I could deliver a combo meal or most other custom orders to you w/in 90 seconds, 98% of the time. But you wouldn’t pay that much, so the business model would collapse
At the McD’s I was trained at and worked at, the fish had dedicated fryers to prevent cross contamination between meats. Unfortunately, the fish usually only had ONE fryer and takes longer than chicken to fry. So if the drive through has two different orders with lots of fish, the grill manager would tell the fryer person to fry up three or so for the first order. But if they need more than that, they have to wait until the fish is done frying before they can drop another basket.
Fish sandwiches are also more time consuming to make because the fillets themselves get seasoning, the buns are steamed which takes longer than toasting, and the fish sandwiches get a half slice of cheese.
Yeah, it’s an efficiency thing. Oddly, at the local McD’s, it has gotten worse since a new addition to their efficiency model (ironic, no?): They’ve outsourced their ordering.
Okay, maybe outsourced isn’t the word, but the person taking the orders at the drive-through is not on-site. They’re linked up to a central office somewhere. I was relatively sure of this when I heard a news article about it, but, being the inquisitive type, I tested it by commenting on the weather and getting a completely wrong response from the order-taker.
Anyway, the off-site order-taker is supposed to give a uniform ordering experience, and just make things faster. The problem with faster order-taking is that it doesn’t make the food prep any faster, so now, more often than not, I’m told ‘can you just pull up over there?’. I don’t know why it frustrates me, but it does.
This being said, I’m not supposed to be eating fast food these days, so perhaps it’s for the best.
On the other hand, there are places like Culvers, where you’re pretty much expected to wait (they give you a number for your order and have parking areas for you to wait for your food to be brought out), and places like the A&W by my friends’ house, which has never, -ever- had me wait for my order (nor gotten a single order wrong, no matter how complex. The people are even cheerful. It’s kinda creepy!)
I assume you’re joking here, but a lot of times if I go through the drive-thru of a place that is notorious for screwing up orders, I will sit there at the window and double-check my order (especially if it is a large one) because I don’t want to get home and THEN find out they forgot one order of fries or somebody’s cheeseburger. If that throws off their system, then the heck with them - they should be more accurate in their order-filling in the first place!
It’s the same problem with any “Metrics driven organization.” Management puts entirely too much stock into the numbers, and the employees find ways to cheat the system to make themselves look better.
In IT organizations, it’s often “tickets closed” that gets the attention, and the obvious result is to open tickets for every little thing, or grab all the “easy tickets” to pad their counts.
Those that work complicated issues, or on long term projects, have lower ticket counts, which of course, make it look like they aren’t doing as much work. So, if we take a phone call to answer a question, they open a ticket. Send an email? Open a ticket. repeat, so that the management feels that more work is being “captured,” when it’s really going down in quality/quantity, because so much time is spent opening tickets for nonsense.
The times I’ve been pulled over, along with other cars, it seems like it was that they had to make a new batch of fries. And I would imagine that our McD’s is understaffed since they are always hiring.
Back when I was getting fast food regularly, there were only a couple of places where I didn’t do this. The Taco Bell that used to be a couple of blocks down the street from me was particularly bad about not putting in one or two items out of half a dozen. I often wondered whether the workers were eating the extras, or what. That location was shut down a while back. I’m sure it’s because of screwy workers. Even if I had only two or three items in my bag, I was almost sure of getting something wrong.
On the other hand, the Long John Silver’s right next door to that TB almost never got an order wrong, and it had a greater variety of items on the menu. You’d think that they would have the same pool of applicants, right? I think it was management, bad in one place, and good in the other.
It is annoying, and the last time I was in a drive thru at McD’s they pulled that trick on me. Lunch rush hour, I order a chzbrger and berry smoothie. I get up to the order window and before I can brake completely, SHE tells me to pull ahead next to the guy who pulled ahead of me and past the guy ahead of him who already pulled ahead. I asked why, she said my fries weren’t ready!
I protest,I have no fries! No one is behind me, but she barks NO! It’s your drink that’s not ready,now pull ahead!
I should have reported the infuriating experience, instead I was curt and borderline rude to the schlep who delivered my bag 10 agonizing minutes later.
It pisses me off because they’ve already got my money. I can’t drive off no matter how long it takes them.
I’ve wondered how many drive offs these places get? people order and see the line is slow. I do it rarely. Maybe a couple times a year I’ll order and the line will just crawl and I’ll go somewhere else.
It’s not always a cheat. Some places seem to use it as a standard practice for custom orders. Example:
Car 1, at the window, ordered something that has to be made, wait 2 minutes
Car 2 - Ordered a Big Mac combo (ready now)
Car 3 - Needs a second to consider their order
In this situation, do you need to hold up the guy in Car 2 to satisfy Car 1 not moving forward a few feet? Car 3 may also be in the same situation, and there’s an unknown number of cars after that car, too (usually not determinable without some actually running outside to look, or until it wraps around the whole building). Getting more orders known as soon as possible means more food cooking, less wait time for everyone.
Now, having to move with noone behind you is kinda stupid but I’m assuming they might have a standard policy, though cheating isn’t unknown.
