I’m one of those people who order precisely what I want, in the order that I’ve come to expect it. For instance, I’ll say, “I’d like a Chicken Nugget Kid’s Meal, with honey mustard sauce, and a Frosty.”
I hate when the nimwit behind the microphone interrupts my well-rehearsed speech.
“I’d like a Chicken Nugget Kid’s Meal, with–”
“----What sauce do you want?”
“Honey mustard. And a coke to --”
“—What drink do you want with that?”
ARRGH!
Thanks Sister Coyote. If someone could verify (or refute) that this is still true, it would be appreciated. Also thanks for the waiting to pull up tip.
But if this (stopping the seconds) is still true:
a) what a huge cheat if it isn’t honestly factored in somehow,
b) sure it’s a minor annoyance, but still, a free fries “comp” vs. customer satisfaction? Seems like a no brainer to me. Yes, I’ve worked retail. In fact I’ve worked complaint desks. Which makes this even more baffling to me. The worst possible outcome of drive thru ordering (other than food poisoning leading to death I suppose) is getting “parked”. Just seems like common sense to me to balance the irritation of the customer with a relatively minor coupon or something. This shows such a lack of foresight and/or customer service that it boggles my mind. (Well, forgetting the straws for drinks too, but I’m usually headed home with the booty and have straws and even glasses there.)
A couple rules for drive-thru employees:
Thou shalt not, when I present the $5 for my $4.32 order, ask, “Do you have 32 cents?” If I wanted to dig around for it, I’d have already done so. It won’t kill you to count out 68 cents from your register. And it probably takes less time than waiting for me to root around my purse for change.
Thou shalt not wait until I get to the window to tell me you have to cook the pies I ordered. If business is so slow that I’m the only one in line, then you have the time to notice that all the pies are gone. If it’s busy, then the person who takes the last pie should know that more will need to be dropped. I don’t mind waiting for the things, but I do object to ordering, then waiting for three or four cars ahead of me, and only then, when I get to the window do I find that you JUST NOW put the pies on to cook. (I knew this was true because I worked at that very restaurant–I was aware of just how long it took pies, fries, etc to cook. By the time I got to the window, they should’ve been in the oil at LEAST two minutes.)
Seems to me that this would lead to customers being needlessly persnickety in hopes of getting something free.
Former (and recovering) fast-food manager speaking, Wendy’s division. Left fast food management in 1992 and have not been stressed by any job since.
I worked about about half a dozen stories in a 50-mile radius from home, and all of them worked more or less the same: a photoelectric eye simply read whether there was a car parked immediately outside the window, when it pulled up, and how long it (the car, not the window) stayed.
The photoelectric eye could be cheated easily if a drive-through attendant had long arms, a good grip on something heavy (such as a cash register) and a large, flat, opaque object (such as a food tray) to cover the eye with. Not that I ever did that.
A clock by the window gave average service times for the periods of 11-2, 2-5, 5-8, and 8-11. However, the clock we initially had did not give car counts or Time At Menuboard.
Then new clocks were installed, which were tied to the menuboard, to the order count at the register (to compare to actual number of cars at window), and to the menu speaker (to count how long it took to greet an incoming car, and how long it took to take that car’s order). It was much easier to tell if the car count varied widely from the order count (i.e., the drive-through cashier was cheating the photoelectric eye).
Generally speaking, I as a manager didn’t give a rat’s patootie about how long it took to take a customer’s order, because there was very little anybody could do to speed up that process if the customer wanted time to be slow. Service times were a priority for a few weeks after the district manager inevitably said they weren’t good enough, until it again became clear that customers were deliberately trying to thwart us. Cars stalled while sitting on the timer, driving service times up to 999 seconds and pinning the needle, so to speak; customers talked on the phone, added orders on at the window, bypassed the menu so they could order face-to-face, friends stopped by to chat with the cashier, got out of their car to look under the window for the dimes they dropped, checked their order and handed out the correct kid toys to the correct children, finished their beers, etc.
So… service times are a thing which people in very serious suits in offices far away think about, as if they can measure money in seconds, while people who actually have to work at the damn place realize that customers can never and will never give a shit as long as they get their food a) right b) fast and c) tasty, or as tasty as possible under the circumstances.
At least when I worked as a manager, we were not permitted by The Rules to give the cashiers the autonomy to give out free fries, coupons, drinks, or anything else at will for orders which had to be pulled ahead for any reason. For the most part, based on the average age and experience of the workforce, I agree with the policy. There are simply not enough managers on-shift to personally give compensatory gifts to any and every customer who feels slightly inconvenienced. (Add to this that the food cost of the coupon came out of my store’s P&L statement, even if they redeemed it at the Wendy’s across town, so we were not even budgeted for this kind of largesse.)
Speaking of which, how come nobody knows how to count out change anymore? They just count out the amount that the register tells them. In the old days, we were taught to start at the sale amount and count up to the amount tendered.
When I worked at this particular fast food joint, they did NOT allow us to use the “cash tendered” button. They had discovered that any time the registers were inoperable (say a brief power outage or simple malfunction), the cashiers were unable to compute change. So they just made us learn how from the very start. For a while there, I couldn’t see any number under 100 without mentally calculating the remainder. (For example, if I saw or heard the number 37, my mind automatically responded with the number 63.) This is the cashier’s version of an earworm!
Ray Kroc is probably turning over in his grave. 
How many billions in advertising has McD’s spent over the decades to associate its menu items with its brand and people still go to the competition thinking they serve Big Macs?
Okay I know it’s “walk thru”, but really!
I returned from the Liquor Store tonight with an extra $12.75. Well, extra if you consider that my math skills countered what the register “told” the cashier to say. No, my purchase did not total $33.10, it totalled $20.35. Hey LOOK -->on the flat screen register you just entered two single bottles as two 4 packs.
Whew, I post a simple rant and when I come back from work it’s longer than the Battlestar Galactica thread. Anyway:
On speed-of-service and parking cars: Most drive-thrus have a timer that starts the second your car trips the sensor at the speaker box and continues counting until the car leaves the window. These times are averaged up over dayparts (breakfast, lunch, late-night etc). and each shift has a time that their average is supposed to be underneath. (For example, on the shift I usually work our quota is 4:30.) Management uses these numbers for everything from employee performance reviews to determining the size of raises. “Parking” a car does stop the timer, but that’s typically not why it’s done. Where I currently work, our policy is that we park you if your order will take more than 30 seconds to prepare and the order for the car behind you is already ready. For the inconvienience we usually throw in a dessert or a free upsize.
On upselling the special item of the month: I have to agree with the people who said they don’t like it when drive-thru people do this to them. This is something that management makes us do in the hopes of moving more units of that particular item (and it does work).
On preview boards: Yes, I realize that not all restaurant chains have these, and of those that do some only have part of the menu on it. But a great many do, including the one I work at, and it surprises me how so many people don’t even seem to notice it - they drive right into the lane when there’s nobody ahead of or behind them, zoom right past it up to the speaker, and then spend two minutes staring at the board while we all wait for them to speak up so we can start cooking.
I detest being asked to pull ahead. What a way to tell your customers that they don’t mean crap to management and/or corporate, they’re just a reason to put the spurs to your harrassed workers. I love being the cause of stress to someone who’s already working hard and just trying to make a living.
I also dislike that policy because it’s now going to take forever for my order to be readied and someone is free to walk it out. The Jack’s that is worst about this has the longest walk in the world from the door to the drive way, as well. Then I’m also forced to make people behind me drive around me in a busy, but tiny parking lot.
A tip for places with drive throughs: Make sure the person working the window speaks enough english to take and confirm orders.
Bow down to my mighty drinking and driving skills! Okay, that came out wrong. In any case, as I drive, I can not only get the top off and straw placed, but I can add lemon and sweetener to my iced tea without spilling. For extra difficulty points I can do all that while getting back on a busy freeway. Yep, I drive a manual and no cupholder just my lap. Does this mean I’m James Bond? If so, I want to be the Sean Connery James Bond, not the Timothy Dalton one, please.
Thanks for the response Smapti. But please, let’s call it something other than “speed of service” if it conveniently disregards those whose service is not speedy.
Just to be clear, the employee didn’t speak enough english to understand I wanted a #1 meal. While I was at the window, they were treated rather rudely by the counter cashier, who certainly had no trouble with the english language. I can understand being short staffed, but that just didn’t seem like a very wise re-distribution of the staff.
As a former cashier I can tell you that 99.999% of the time that happens the register guy is running low on change and doesn’t want to wait for the manager to walk to the safe and come back with a roll of pennies. Trust me, it takes less time for you to root around in your purse.
The restaurants can’t win. The customer complains if he’s pulled ahead to wait an additional minute while food is made hot and fresh; he complains if he’s given food that isn’t hot and fresh. He complains if he has to wait at the window. He complains that the order is handed to him so fast that he doesn’t have time to put his change back in his wallet.
Some people should just go back to hunting and gathering.
The customers are not there to make your numbers look good, you are there for their convenience. I agree that customers shouldn’t pull up and change their minds 20 times while arguing with their boatload of brats and someone else on a cell phone, but if they’re just looking at the menu your service numbers are your own goddamn problem. If the customer spends the same total time in the drive thru, but your numbers vary depending on whether they looked at the preview board first, then management has their heads up their ass.
Nitpick.
Just wanna point out that it actually goes:
“I’m rubber, you’re glue,
Bounce off me and sticks to you.”
Which I know isn’t exactly grammatical, as it oughta be, “Bounces off me”, but that’s playground chants for ya.
This version scans better, too.
File for future reference. 
but of course, as a comeback from some one chronically over the age of 5 years old, it’s still pretty fucking lame.
My experience as a cashier was a bit different, I guess. Almost 100% of the time, we had mucho extra rolls of coins. I rarely had to go get change–at least in coin form–and I remember only a couple of times that another register needed me to give them pennies. Primarily, a customer only had to wait on change if he presented a large bill for a small dollar order–dollar bills always seemed to run out quickly. And lowly cashiers were not allowed to change $50’s and $100’s, we had to get management (I hated this SO bad). But I wouldn’t mind it so much if I was told, “I’m out of pennies, do you have any change?” Rarely, if ever, when I couldn’t pony up the coins did I hear this–they just counted the change from the drawer.
There were a couple of times that a cashier opened rolls of coins just before counting time at the end of her shift (a fast food type of short-sheeting a bed, you know) so the manager (or ass’t manager) had piles of coins to count. It’s a good thing some of them had a sense of humor (no, I never had the guts to try it)!
Actually, given that the same poster complains a few posts later about kids these days (In My day, we HAD to compute change in our heads!), I thought it was hilarious.
Daniel