Fast Food Restaurants

[Pelosigalore]

Have you guys noticed that the service is getting slower and slower when dining in? Chick Fil A used to have very quick service but now it’s worse than McDonalds
I don’t blame it on the employees, I blame the fact that to go like uber eats and drive through have about 90% of the attention

 

[AmericanDragon]

Too many customers and for the # of employees on the clock. Labor is the most expensive variable cost for a fast food restaurant, so they always look to get by on the fewest amount of employees as possible.

 

[funKYcat75]

Chick Fil A used to have very quick service but now it’s worse than McDonalds

Pretty easy to be fast when you don't particularly care what you're putting in the bag. I can count on one hand the number of correct orders I have received from mcDonalds in the past 10 years. I'll wait a extra minute or two for some homeschooled girl to bring out my piping hot chicken sandwich.

 

[WildcatFan1982]

I don’t mind if my order is messed up if it’s something like putting a tomato on there when I say no tomato. If you’ve never worked in fast food you don’t get just how frantic it can get in the back sometimes mixed with the muscle memory of doing it the way you were trained.

However, once I ordered a burger, fries, and a blizzard from Dairy Queen. Order showed up and it was 2 hot dogs and a bottle of water. With the receipt with my order taped to it 😐

 

[LineSkiCat14]

I'll stick with my go to answer for why the world is crashing:

Project Managers.

Some PM is at that McDonalds making the cooks sit through a meeting on how WIP limits and swim lanes work for simple burger production, and we all suffer for it.

 

[8titles]

I'll stick with my go to answer for why the world is crashing:

Project Managers.

Some PM is at that McDonalds making the cooks sit through a meeting on how WIP limits and swim lanes work for simple burger production, and we all suffer for it.

Interesting take. So you think that McDonalds workers actually attend any meeting, let alone a project meeting? To me its simply lack of pride in your work, or just general work ethic. No more and no less. But hey, they now make $15+ an hour so that's awesome.

 

[LineSkiCat14]

Interesting take. So you think that McDonalds workers actually attend any meeting, let alone a project meeting? To me its simply lack of pride in your work, or just general work ethic. No more and no less. But hey, they now make $15+ an hour so that's awesome.

I just like shitting on PMs.

As for the topic at hand, idk. Maybe the ultimately comes down to raising a few decades worth of shitheads, and we just need to swing the pendulum back being held accountable. There's so much broken with society right now, who knows.

 

[Creed Bratton]

I don’t mind if my order is messed up if it’s something like putting a tomato on there when I say no tomato. If you’ve never worked in fast food you don’t get just how frantic it can get in the back sometimes mixed with the muscle memory of doing it the way you were trained.

However, once I ordered a burger, fries, and a blizzard from Dairy Queen. Order showed up and it was 2 hot dogs and a bottle of water. With the receipt with my order taped to it 😐

Just a PSA but if you are at Dixie Queen in Memphis and they screw your order up just eat whatever it is and be happy. Do not go back in to complain or request a refund or the manager just may shoot at you. 😂

Story here

 

[the nail at the foul line]

Just a PSA but if you are at Dixie Queen in Memphis and they screw your order up just eat whatever it is and be happy. Do not go back in to complain or request a refund or the manager just may shoot at you. 😂

Story here

I was at a place about 20 years ago that I ate at quite a bit. They brought me the wrong order and I told the waitress and she said "well, that's what you got and you're going to eat it." She was correct.

 

[BC_Wader]

I only go to Chic Fil A and Culvers when I want fast food, which isn't very often anymore. They both can't be beat IMO.

I ordered Pizza Hut a few weeks ago and took well over an hour to get my pizza and I live just right down the road. If I hadn't been drinking I just would've carried it out. Anyways, before it arrived I was getting texts from Doordash. "Your pizza is on it's way" "Your Doordasher is in your neighborhood" " Your Doordasher is pulling on your street".
I guess Pizza Hut uses them now. The poor driver looked like she had been driving all day long.

 

[UKWildcats1987]

I only go to Chic Fil A and Culvers when I want fast food, which isn't very often anymore. They both can't be beat IMO.

I ordered Pizza Hut a few weeks ago and took well over an hour to get my pizza and I live just right down the road. If I hadn't been drinking I just would've carried it out. Anyways, before it arrived I was getting texts from Doordash. "Your pizza is on it's way" "Your Doordasher is in your neighborhood" " Your Doordasher is pulling on your street".
I guess Pizza Hut uses them now. The poor driver looked like she had been driving all day long.

I did delivery from Papa John's and 2 foreign guys rolled up. It was dark and I was like wtf. Dude clearly couldn't speak english either. Apparently having 2 people do deliveries is a thing some places so was fine but at the time it was bizarre.

On fast food as a whole, I can't imagine dining n for fast food. My parents do and Maybe it's a generational thing. I'd rather go through drive through and take it home. You never know how long you have to make it to toilet after consuming taco bell.

 

[AmericanDragon]

I don’t mind if my order is messed up if it’s something like putting a tomato on there when I say no tomato. If you’ve never worked in fast food you don’t get just how frantic it can get in the back sometimes mixed with the muscle memory of doing it the way you were trained.

However, once I ordered a burger, fries, and a blizzard from Dairy Queen. Order showed up and it was 2 hot dogs and a bottle of water. With the receipt with my order taped to it 😐

Back when i worked in fast food, if you had given me the option between being the line "cook" making the food or being the consolidator responsible for making sure everything was made right and all the orders are bagged correctly, I would choose every single time being the line cook. Beng line cook is easy compared to consolidating.

You might say "well how hard can it possibly be to put food in a bag?" Well...

• You have multiple orders coming in every minute during peak hours
• They are being made at varying speeds so you have to keep up with multiple orders at the same time
• You have to verify all the mods are correct with the line cook who made it. Or at least at the restaurant I worked at that was the responsibility of the consolidator
• You likely are doing it solo because everyone else is busy because the manager staffed the fewest possible people to work and someone likely called out so you're even more short staffed than usual
• And then you have to do it as fast as possible because every order is supposed to be completed in X number of minutes, even if it's an obscenely large order that's impossible to be completed in said time frame. And as I'm sure we all know, doing something as fast as possible is just a recipe for mistakes.

And that's not even including fixing orders that were made and entered exactly how the customer stated but they swear on their life and everything that is holy that they did not order a chicken sandwich but instead ordered a greek salad.

 

[WeWant9]

The delivery services have bogged down some restaurants, and they keep trying to do it with the same crew.

A while back I went to Chipotle and had a long line with two or three people working, but they all seemed way more focused on getting the online orders ready vs the people there. I understand stuff can be slow, but it’s annoying when a preference seems to be given to online orders vs those in the actual store. I walked out and went to Qdoba and had a burrito in under 5 mins.

 

[megablue]

Freddy’s is usually reliable.

 

[Creed Bratton]

The delivery services have bogged down some restaurants, and they keep trying to do it with the same crew.

A while back I went to Chipotle and had a long line with two or three people working, but they all seemed way more focused on getting the online orders ready vs the people there. I understand stuff can be slow, but it’s annoying when a preference seems to be given to online orders vs those in the actual store. I walked out and went to Qdoba and had a burrito in under 5 mins.

I love Chipotle but you can just about go to a Mexican restaurant cheaper than Moe's or Chipotle these days.

 

[BC_Wader]

I love Chipotle but you can just about go to a Mexican restaurant cheaper than Moe's or Chipotle these days.

There's a taco truck up here in town that has THE best fast Mexican food I've ever had. My Uncle lived in Arizona for a while and loves mexican food. He said that truck had the best fast mexican food he's ever had. Sissy's Tacos. You owe it to yourself to stop there if in the Bullitt County area.

 

[JonathanW]

Story about a Chik-Fil-A in Raleigh. Not long after everything reopened (covid) one in Raleigh that I lived near started full-time having multiple girls in the drive through line, some to take orders, then a few cars ahead of that to take payment, then a few cars ahead of that to tell you "merge in behind the black car beside you". And they got really efficient. So much so that after about a month they advertised for a couple of weeks that they were going to try and set a record for most cars going thru the drive-thru in an hour. They wanted to get 500 cars thru in 1 hour. Yes, 1 every 7.2 seconds.
They even sent out emails to those who use their app, they were putting free chicken sandwiches on your app if you did the mobile drive thru that day. I upgraded mine to add cheese & remove the pickles.
The day came, I went, and the double-line was out to the street, nearly football field length, with even more girls out working. It only took me 3-4 minutes to get to the window, I did not even come to a full stop, I literally drove thru at 2-3mpg as they were handing me my food.
They sent out a follow-up email a few days later saying that they did achieve their 500 car goal in under an hour.

Meanwhile during that same time period, the next closest CFA couldn't probably do 50 cars in an hour. I wouldn't even go there they were so slow (I lived about 1/2 between the 2).

 

[funKYcat75]

One of the small joys in my life is speeding past the non-App users in the line at Chick-Fil-A. Filthy peasants.

 

[Pelosigalore]

The delivery services have bogged down some restaurants, and they keep trying to do it with the same crew.

A while back I went to Chipotle and had a long line with two or three people working, but they all seemed way more focused on getting the online orders ready vs the people there. I understand stuff can be slow, but it’s annoying when a preference seems to be given to online orders vs those in the actual store. I walked out and went to Qdoba and had a burrito in under 5 mins.

Exactly

 

[entropy13]

Back when i worked in fast food, if you had given me the option between being the line "cook" making the food or being the consolidator responsible for making sure everything was made right and all the orders are bagged correctly, I would choose every single time being the line cook. Beng line cook is easy compared to consolidating.

You might say "well how hard can it possibly be to put food in a bag?" Well...

• You have multiple orders coming in every minute during peak hours
• They are being made at varying speeds so you have to keep up with multiple orders at the same time
• You have to verify all the mods are correct with the line cook who made it. Or at least at the restaurant I worked at that was the responsibility of the consolidator
• You likely are doing it solo because everyone else is busy because the manager staffed the fewest possible people to work and someone likely called out so you're even more short staffed than usual
• And then you have to do it as fast as possible because every order is supposed to be completed in X number of minutes, even if it's an obscenely large order that's impossible to be completed in said time frame. And as I'm sure we all know, doing something as fast as possible is just a recipe for mistakes.

And that's not even including fixing orders that were made and entered exactly how the customer stated but they swear on their life and everything that is holy that they did not order a chicken sandwich but instead ordered a greek salad.

Hold on, hold on. You got Peter Principle'd by the position of order consolidator at a fast food joint?

 

[birdforbogey]

Have you guys noticed that the service is getting slower and slower when dining in? Chick Fil A used to have very quick service but now it’s worse than McDonalds
I don’t blame it on the employees, I blame the fact that to go like uber eats and drive through have about 90% of the attention

I went to the chik-fil a drive thru Sunday and must of waited for a half an hour for someone to take. Y order. Finally got pi$$ed of and went to huddle house.

 

[Wesley91581]

They just opened a Zaxby’s in Louisville and it’s drive thru only.

 

[berniecarbo]

I was talking to a guy the other day. He said his son had some kind of scholarship money at Murray State. He said his son had to spend it on a meal plan from Murray. There is a Chic Fil A on campus that is on the meal plan. He said his son ordered a chicken sandwich and had to wait two hours. I forget if he said his son was either #200 or 300 on the wait list.

 

[WayneDougan]

The delivery services have bogged down some restaurants, and they keep trying to do it with the same crew.

Yeah, ordering in person only was a nice way of throttling the order intake, making it a smooth flow of food to the customer. There is unlimited order flow when you use mobile apps, so it can impact customer satisfaction because you have no idea where you stand in relation to others. They need to figure this out.

I went to Starbucks once and there was nobody in there. My daughter wanted some fru fru drink, and when I ordered it they said it would be 20 minutes cause there were so many mobile orders. Sorry gal, you’re now getting a drip coffee or nothing at all.

 

[Creed Bratton]

I went to the chik-fil a drive thru Sunday and must of waited for a half an hour for someone to take. Y order. Finally got pi$$ed of and went to huddle house.

You should have been in church you heathen.

 

[Caveman Catfan]

We go to Jaggers. I do not mind sitting and letting them bring me my food. It is still fast and they usually get it right.

 

[cole854]

Given it is the second busiest/volume CFA in the state of KY, the Hamburg location does quite well. Occasionally, they will have the B team working and it slows down some, but generally they are pushing some chicken thru w/ the quickness.

Pet peeve of any FF place....if it is breakfast and I order a regular breakfast item, I am not pulling forward to wait on my food. I didn't order anything special, so it should be ready. Same goes for lunch/dinner....if I am not convoluting my order w/ special requests, then I am not pulling thru to the parking space of hell that often is impossible to get out of.

 

[birdforbogey]

Given it is the second busiest/volume CFA in the state of KY, the Hamburg location does quite well. Occasionally, they will have the B team working and it slows down some, but generally they are pushing some chicken thru w/ the quickness.

Pet peeve of any FF place....if it is breakfast and I order a regular breakfast item, I am not pulling forward to wait on my food. I didn't order anything special, so it should be ready. Same goes for lunch/dinner....if I am not convoluting my order w/ special requests, then I am not pulling thru to the parking space of hell that often is impossible to get out of.

😂. My dad used to refuse to pull up.

 

[WildcatFan1982]

Given it is the second busiest/volume CFA in the state of KY, the Hamburg location does quite well. Occasionally, they will have the B team working and it slows down some, but generally they are pushing some chicken thru w/ the quickness.

Pet peeve of any FF place....if it is breakfast and I order a regular breakfast item, I am not pulling forward to wait on my food. I didn't order anything special, so it should be ready. Same goes for lunch/dinner....if I am not convoluting my order w/ special requests, then I am not pulling thru to the parking space of hell that often is impossible to get out of.

Good. The only reason they ask you to pull ahead is because ever car is timed and they’re expected to meet certain standards. That long wait hurts the metrics so they move you forward to make their numbers look good.

*I worked at a Fazolis one summer and the district manager caught me doing that. He wasn’t happy

 

[barbourfor3]

I'll stick with my go to answer for why the world is crashing:

Project Managers.

Some PM is at that McDonalds making the cooks sit through a meeting on how WIP limits and swim lanes work for simple burger production, and we all suffer for it.

This is outstanding sir!!

 

[MegaBlue05]

I haven’t eaten inside of a fast food joint in ages. Drive thru + parking lot for me. No strangers jibber jabbering, no employees whining about being at work, no kids squawking. Just me, some food and a podcast. Perfection.

I have been told (long ago) by people
In the industry that drive through takes priority over dining room because of various timers and metrics. My favorite was the Burger King in a town I used to live in would hold you at the pay window until
Someone motioned you to the food window. I know they were doing this to cheat the metrics.

Also, CFA is chicken for people who think black pepper is spicy. It’s so plain.

 

[AmericanDragon]

Hold on, hold on. You got Peter Principle'd by the position of order consolidator at a fast food joint?

Only when I did it the first time during a lunch rush on a rainy day, which meant we were even busier than a normal lunch rush. Any rush at a fast food place is the dumbest time to put someone on a new position for the first time.

If I had to rank difficulty of a position, consolidator would quite possibly combined the most difficult and stressful job I ever had and it was the second lowest paid job I ever had. The only other one that paid less was my first job as a 16-year-old working for minimum wage when the minimum wage was still $5.15.

The only job I've had that was equally or more physically stressful was landscaping. The only job that was equally or more mentally stressful was athletic communications, but during the off-season that job was a breeze. Fast food doesn't have an off-season.

As far as difficulty goes ... each job has its own things that can make it difficult. None of the others constantly required me to juggle multiple unique tasks with a deadline of five minutes or less for every order for several hours on end with the expectation of 100% accuracy.

So for me that is more difficult than other jobs I've had that require more knowledge and/or a much higher skill level.

Like pay me the same wage for every job I've ever had and fast food consolidator would easily be my last pick.

 

[AmericanDragon]

Yeah, ordering in person only was a nice way of throttling the order intake, making it a smooth flow of food to the customer. There is unlimited order flow when you use mobile apps, so it can impact customer satisfaction because you have no idea where you stand in relation to others. They need to figure this out.

I went to Starbucks once and there was nobody in there. My daughter wanted some fru fru drink, and when I ordered it they said it would be 20 minutes cause there were so many mobile orders. Sorry gal, you’re now getting a drip coffee or nothing at all.

You can limit the # of online/mobile orders you take so you don't get overwhelmed with orders like in that one episode of The Bear when they first started doing online ordering.

 

[AmericanDragon]

Given it is the second busiest/volume CFA in the state of KY, the Hamburg location does quite well. Occasionally, they will have the B team working and it slows down some, but generally they are pushing some chicken thru w/ the quickness.

Pet peeve of any FF place....if it is breakfast and I order a regular breakfast item, I am not pulling forward to wait on my food. I didn't order anything special, so it should be ready. Same goes for lunch/dinner....if I am not convoluting my order w/ special requests, then I am not pulling thru to the parking space of hell that often is impossible to get out of.

Sandwiches are generally made ready to order. They don't just have BEC biscuits sitting under a heat lamp ready to hand out to you as soon as the cashier submits the order to back of the house.

 

[AmericanDragon]

I haven’t eaten inside of a fast food joint in ages. Drive thru + parking lot for me. No strangers jibber jabbering, no employees whining about being at work, no kids squawking. Just me, some food and a podcast. Perfection.

I have been told (long ago) by people
In the industry that drive through takes priority over dining room because of various timers and metrics. My favorite was the Burger King in a town I used to live in would hold you at the pay window until
Someone motioned you to the food window. I know they were doing this to cheat the metrics.

Also, CFA is chicken for people who think black pepper is spicy. It’s so plain.

Drive thru is generally busier and the expectation is for service to be quicker, so yeah it generally gets more attention.

It's normally quicker to make the food at drive-thru because people make less mods at drive thru and the orders are smaller on average. The line cooks at drive-thru typically have headsets on so they can hear what's being ordered and can start making it before the order is finalized. Also, drive-thru customers typically more often than not know exactly what they want so it doesn't take them as long to order.

So everything about drive-thru makes it much quicker to get more customers in and out in the same time frame as you can in-store.

 

[rick64]

I'm sure I'm in the minority here but I've never found Chic Fil A to be all that tasty. There are much better tasting chicken sandwiches out there.

 

[HymanKaplan]

Wendy's Spicy Chicken is better in my opinon.

CFA is absurdly over-hyped. I'm not saying it's terrible, but the product doesn't come anywhere close to the cult like reputation it gets.

And it's damn sure not worth the byzantine drive-thru experience.

 

[JDHoss]

Our granddaughters spent the night last Saturday. They wanted McD's, so I ordered on the app. It took me 10 minutes to get there. There were no other vehicles in line, so I thought I'd be on the way home in 30 seconds or so. I picked the ticket up and was told to pull over to a parking spot for pickup. Thirteen minutes later, they brought my order out, which was two burger meals and a Happy Meal. Twenty+ minutes seems a little excessive to prepare that when they weren't swamped.

 

[cole854]

I'm sure I'm in the minority here but I've never found Chic Fil A to be all that tasty. There are much better tasting chicken sandwiches out there.

Not that you can get in 5 minutes and for $5.

 

[cole854]

CFA is absurdly over-hyped.

Yep....that is definitely why they are absurdly busy.