Nonsense. Around here drive-thrus do a huge chunk of their business in the wee hours. 2 AM on a Friday or Saturday, after the bars have all let out, Jack-in-the-Box has lines around the block. And although I can barely remember the last time I got fast food during daylight hours, I can assure you the food is exactly the same, and possibly quite a lot better depending on how much partying you’ve done.
Haha. Yep.
You were probably recipient to more than just the stinkeye
What ever happened to either waiting until the person said “that’ll be all” or asking “Will that be all?” if they don’t? Growing up, I thought “that’ll be all” was a single word that was like the “amen” for drive thru orders.
When I worked at McDonald’s as a cashier in the 1980s, we were specifically trained to suggest any items that were missing from the standard trio of sandwich/fries/drink. They had “secret” shoppers who would visit your store, place an order, and then perform a detailed written evaluation of the experience: restaurant cleanliness, service experience (including whether the cashier had suggested the one item missing from the standard trio), and food quality. If the cashier did everything right, they got a free lunch out of the deal. When you were a teenager working for minimum wage, a free lunch was pretty good incentive for toeing the line.
I have no doubt that this is still standard practice at McDonald’s, and probably is at other restaurants too.
I rarely eat food bought from a drive thru and never order drinks from places like that. Generally my order is a sandwich, no fries or drink. If they ask if I want something to drink, I’ll ask for a beer. Of course they don’t have beer so that ends the ordering process.
Wow. I don’t mean to be a meanie, but if you think dressing up to the level expected at a fast food joint is too much work, you’ve got some unusual standards.
…
The latter thing is a symptom of the same complaints everybody has. Many of the order entry / cash register systems really want the inputs in a very specific sequence.
If you can ask for what you want in the exact sequence the person has to push the buttons, then it all goes smoothly. If not, it won’t.
The upselling script they’re required to recite makes it even worse because they have to upsell the sandwich before you get to talking about the fries or whatever. So they have to interrupt you even if you’re saying everything in the right sequence.
And of course no two chains use the same software, so the correct food ordering sequence at Burgerworld is different from at Krustie’s.
I think it was Wendy’s where “Here or to go?” HAD to be the very first thing input; they couldn’t type anything until that was entered. At McDs it was the last thing to input. etc.
Back in the Dayes of Yore when I ate that garbage I used to order the same thing every time I went to any particular chain. And after my order was done I’d sometimes ask the cashier “What’s the correct sequence to tell you all this so there’s no confusion and backtracking?” They were always happy to explain it once they understood what the heck I was talking about.
Some places it was “double burger”, other places it was “burger, double.” Some places wanted the list of with condiments: “with ketchup, pickles”. Others wanted the without list: “without mustard, onions”. Etc.
But once I learned the correct sequence for that chain, my orders went very quickly & accurately. Until they changed their register software 6 months later. :smack:
Related hijack:
I’ve seen self-order kiosks set up in a few McDs. I wonder how that effort to retrain the customers is going?
I’ve always wondered why this wasn’t something that’s been developed and standard throughout the fast-food industry. It seems so… obvious. Why do I need an actual person to punch the button for a “#3 and a Coke, to go” when they could easily just cut that person (and their salary) out of the equation and simply turn the register around to face the other way?
There were a couple of Jack-In-The-Boxes I’d go to occasionally that had these, and I’d actually intentionally go inside just to use them. Amazing how my order never got screwed up that way.
There was one McDonald’s near downtown LA that was trying these when I was last in there (about six months ago). I only used it once. I ordered a highly customized breakfast, including putting jalapeños on the Sausage McMuffin, and it threw them off so badly that I decided never to go down that path again. (I never got the jalapeños either, dammit.)
Because now they have to teach every customer how to operate their cash register. And you’ve seen most of their customers. 
e-commerce is great for Amazon. We all sit at home using our PCs and our bandwidth that we paid for to send them a completed order. A McDonalds with 5 trained cashiers might need 15 or 20 kiosks to be able to process the same number of orders as fast given how crappy people are at learning & thinking & doing. So they’d have to pay for, have room for, install, power, and maintain all 20 kiosks. Heck, they’ll probably need one helper employee per one or two kiosks to keep things moving. Overall, not gonna work.
The kiosk idea predated all of us carrying an online supercomputer in our pocket.
The direction they’re all going now is phone apps. You can enter your order from out in the parking lot, or at your work, or wherever. Plus pay for it by online credit card, PayPal, etc. Then just show up to grab your order. In and out in 15 seconds. Ka-CHING for them.
It doesn’t matter to them if you’re an app wizard & can order your meal in 4 seconds flat or are an app doofus who struggles for 15 minutes to get it right. They only care that their computers only get involved for a fraction of a second once you eventually tap [Submit].
Apparently it’s that way at Arby’s because that’s the very first thing they ask when you walk up.
Yes! At McD’s the “is that for here or to go” question determined which button we pushed to display the total price. It was the same price either way, but of course you couldn’t push “dine in total” or “take-out total” until something had been ordered.
I’ve been eating at Wendy’s for years now, and their ordering process still throws me off kilter. When I walk up to the register, I typically manage to get the first syllable of “#6 combo” out of my mouth before they interrupt and ask “dining room, or to go?”. :smack:
It could go the other way, such as in the movie Dude, where’s my car.
And then…
Yeah. Most of these places throw me for a loop but back then the one I really mastered was Wendy’s because it was closest to my office:
“forherenumbersixmealdoubleplusketchupminusmayominusonions.”
Tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik. “That’ll be $6.83.”
Swipe. Done.
8 keystrokes & 5 seconds flat.
Didn’t take much longer to eat either. 
Fast food is supposed to be fast, dammit. Buurrrp :eek:
This has to be one of the stupidest logistic decisions ever made. The can already take orders faster than they can fill them so their “solution” is to try to force more through the choke point at once? It doesn’t speed things up. It just creates chaos and bottlenecks, and slows them down even more. I call it the “I Love Lucy Effect”, in honor of the famous candy factory episode.
Let’s not forget the ketchup game. Does anyone that works there actually use ketchup with their fries? I guess not.
“Can I get 8 ketchups please?”
::hands me three::
“Can I now get 5 ketchups?”
::hands me two more::
“Almost there! Just three more…”
::hands me two::
“Aaaand just one more and you’re all done!”
Also I used to say at the beginning of the process whether it was to go or not, but I have given up, since it doesn’t stop them from asking me again at the end.
I hope you enjoyed the spit with your coffee.
It’s easier to clarify before a receipt is made, what size beverage will be on said receipt. I guaranfuckintee if they just gave people ordering a “large” what is called a “medium” on the receipt without explanation, next they have to deal with annoyed customers complaining they ordered a large.
I strain to hear as hard as I can, but I usually end up saying, “I have no idea what you just said, but I’ll tell you what I want.”
when you don’t list what comes on your burgers, getting irritated when I don’t order in the precise order you want and then asking me what I don’t want on the burger is really annoying. I told you I want mustard pickle lettuce and tomato, why are you asking correcting the way I order? Asking me what I don’t want when I don’t know what you put on the burger is pretty ridiculous. When you tell me you put mayonnaise, mustard, pickle lettuce and tomato and I say “, no mayo.” Why the hell do you then put onions and ketchup on it?
I understand that they have a certain way they have to enter stuff in the register but it is just crazy to always tell the customer that they are wrong.
What she said. I used to work in fast food, and while I wouldn’t spit in your coffee, rudeness like that would earn you the biggest stinkeye I could possibly give you without losing my job.
The real problem here is, as always, marketing.
Sensible people know that if something comes in three sizes, they’re the smallest, the one in the middle, and the largest. Which logically ought to be named “small”, “medium”, and “large”.
When the marketing wizards get ahold of it and the same three sizes are renamed as “medium”, “large”, and “extra large” then they’ve just destroyed any hope of clear communication.
Does the spoken order for “medium” now mean the middle size because the customer doesn’t know your Branded® Terminology, or does it mean the smallest size because he does know and use your Branded® Terminology? There is no way to know.
Ditto for “Large”. So now we see that two of the three actual official size names of the company’s product are carefully chosen to be completely useless.
In a sense the Starbucks approach of coining stupid nonsense words for their sizes is smarter than redefining ordinary size words to mean non-standard things.
I certainly sympathize with the poor order takers. This is none of their doing; they are victims as much as the customers. But I also sympathize with the customers.
Speaking just for me, I refuse to buy into Branded® Terminology.
So I say “I’ll have the <smallest | middle-sized | largest> coffee; whatever you call that.” I’m using adjectives, not nouns, and (I hope) making clear that I’m not using their magic words. When they say back “You mean vente?” or “You mean ultra-colossal?” I just say “Yes” and accept what I get; it’s usually within one step of being the size I intended.
There’s no excuse for customers to be jerks to workers. There’s also no excuse for workers expecting the customers to know *anything *about the unique vocabulary & ordering idiosyncracies of their employer. Even for someplace as ubiquitous & long-established as McDonalds. Both sides should appreciate good work & clear communication. But can’t expect it, nor get pissy when they don’t get it.