Drive Thru Service

We live in a fast paced world and that drive thru is necessary sometimes, in a hurry, have kids, bad weather or just plain lazy.

I have worked my share of drive thrus windows as a manager of various fast food establishments and they are ridiculous to deal with.

What I take pride on is making it as pleasant as possible. I don't just shove the people down the road, I smile, ask them how their day is going, do they need any directions, extra napkins, suitable amount of condiments, but there are steps involved in completing the customer experience and the tone begins at the order screen.

When a customer first drives up they are not always ready to scream an order at you, sometimes they need a moment to get their order together, other people in the car, separate orders, kids misbehaving or begging for an ice cream, trying to talk on their cell phone at the same time. And let's face it the speaker system on both ends can be a challenge. Who designs these damn things? You would think with all the technology now a days they would have Bose speakers and Blue Tooth head sets rather than these ridiculous head sets they use for the employees and the speaker system for the customers.

Now I see where McDonald's is making changes:

McDonald’s Drive-Thru Goes Digital

McDonald’s has more than 36,000 locations worldwide. Its U.S. workforce alone is four times the size of Atlanta, Georgia. The company sells 75 hamburgers per second. But, still, there are issues. Profits have been on the slide, as higher-ups continue to fiddle with the menu and reconsider approach, struggling to keep pace with a middle-class increasingly weary of fast food. More and more, McDonald’s is looking like a towering (if slowly eroding) twentieth-century monolith.

This is just fine and dandy, but it is not going to change how the drive thru processes your order and I bet it will actually slow down service.

The most effective way to do a drive thru? Eliminate the order boards and the speakers. Have a dedicated order window for people that need a few moments and the customer's that know what they want or have simple orders go to a different window, like they do at the grocery store for express lanes. It can be done and would save a lot of problems from occurring.

The order taker can take the order, verify the order, collect the money for the order and make sure that details are given to the order processor that makes sure the right car gets the right food, such as type of vehicle, how many passengers, is there a pet to give a treat, children to give special prizes, seniors or handicap customers that need special attention.

There is, also, a fundamental problem with the way the food is bagged. Many places have this SOS expectation they put on their employees, Spped Of Service, and this creates problems with the wrong cars getting the wrong food. On my shifts, I made sure customers checked their order before they left the window, I was more concerned about accuracy and quality, rather than speed and it turns out the customer's would rather not be treated like cattle and shoved through the shoot, praying they got what they ordered.

Drive thrus are not just for convenience, they are still supposed to uphold the same standard of service as if you were being waited on at a restaurant, unfortunately this is just not the case.

Here are a few tips for ensuring you have the best chance for getting at least fresh food, this does not guarantee that there will not be funny business even using these tips and I will explain why and how it can be done. One can only hope the manager on duty and the employees that are there have integrity and want to serve you and treat you the way they would want to be treated and served.

Don't ever give your order at the speaker, just inform them you will driving to the window.

Repeat and verify what you ordered and do not leave the window without a detailed receipt of said order.

Before you leave the pick up window always take a moment to check everything is there. Be direct about what you need to complete the order.

When ordering, if you want fresh and hot or fresh and cold, plain is the way to go.

No salt fries. They still might take old fries and dump them back in the fryer, but they will be hot and no salt, just be sure and taste one, if it taste like cardboard they reheated old fries, refuse them and insist on fresh, you don't mind the 3:30 minutes.

No cherry/No nuts/No Whipped cream. Never get a cherry on your shake or sundae, they are disgusting. Only get nuts in the package. Ask for whipped cream on the side. This is not to say they won't recycle old ice cream products. Some places use that soft serve crap and will just dump it back in the machine. They will freeze mistakes and serve them if an order comes up they can use it on.

No condiments. Always ask for plain sandwiches, if you want cheese, okay, but they will use old cheese on your sandwich and they will use old sandwiches to make your "fresh" one. They may even take the meat and wash it off and use it on your no condiment order, but this only happens sometimes.

Salads? This is a crap shoot at the drive thru.

They will give the drive thru customer the oldest product they have. Drive thrus off the highway are the worst, they do not ever expect to see you again, so very little care. So, always go in and get your food when traveling, never use the drive thru.

I could give you specifics about certain companies because I have worked for many over the years. The truth is while I hated working for Chick-Fil-A, they were the best at giving drive thru service, they were just to obnoxious to work for and that is hard to do to me. They had this religious fanaticism in their work place that just rubbed me the wrong way, still, if I want a fresh salad or a chicken sandwich or a shake that is where I will go.

This concludes my Drive Thru experience for the day!

Cool post, I'm in New York and we have a lot of English as a 4th language people at the drive thru and almost never, and I mean never get the most basic orders right. I personally just don't use them anymore.

I would like to add...don't pull up.
9 times out of 10 when I have been asked to pull up, I ask them how long is it going to take and the order is at the window before they can give me an answer.

Any time I have pulled up(and that is very rare), I have waited up to 5 minutes and usually wind up going in.

They have a timer that tracks how long you are at the window, and it's all about speed rather than service.

Most of the time I just tell them that I will not pull up.

Keep in mind if you order something special that takes a little longer to prepare, you should pull up if there is a line behind you. It may be better for you to take the extra time to go in if you have a special order.

Above all, remember that we're all in this together. Be courteous, but demand the service that we all deserve, and remember that the employees in the restaurant are people to.

Live in Georgia. Grew up at the actual Chik-fil-a in Morrow, GA when it was just a small restaurant. It was a fav of my family-knew the Cathys. The religiosity of the company is bizarre but it is still the best drive-thru I have ever known-friendly, sweet people-I guess, unless you are gay or breast-feeding.

and then ?