I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store.
They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.
At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT.
(Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)
Tell this to the idiots at supermarket checkout who wait for the total price to ring up before they reach into their purse (or whatever) to retrieve their checkbook and only then begin filling in alllllll the check's fields...
I get what you're saying, but a downside to what you're describing is guaranteed waste of food. If food is prepared based on expectations, there's no way that all the food will be ordered before it goes cold/end of hours, and has to be dumped.
If you sell 80-150 hamburgers at the lunch rush, front loading 70 so there’s a bunch at the start is fine.
But current system is close to perfection for me.
Yes, peepul, this was a thing.
You'd go in, and ask them what's hot, and you'd pick one and pay and you're off to the munchies races.
We call it an automatiek. It's not just FEBO, there's a few other chains that do it too. Like Smuller's at the train stations. I always love the satay croquettes.
I remember 1980s McDonalds, where they had steel rows of styrofoam encased Big Macs and Quarter Pounders behind seven tills of staff, with little metal separators telling the time they were made so anything older than 10 minutes was sent to the garbage. This was before drive throughs, but even with a line five deep you'd be out in 5 minutes at noon. My boss would take us for lunch every day, it was amazing.
Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order.
I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.