Drive-thru parking?

[Silicon Surfer]

Jack in the Box in Southern California has been doing this for 15 or 20 years.

 

[Marvolo]

Have y'all seen these? If your drive thru order is taking too long, they tell you park over there and we'll bring it out to you.

McD's is the primary culprit, but some others are doing the same with or without the sign. This thing is totally missing the point of drive thru. The key word here is drive, so I have to park my car to wait for my order, I might as well park in a regular spot and go inside the store.

That said, I'm not a big McDonalds patron so really it doesn't matter to me. But I find the concept rather ridiculous.

Drive thrus have a timer on them. It records how long a car sits at the window. Management prefers cars be continually moving through or for the drive thru to average a low amount of time per car. When I worked drive thru we weren't allowed to keep cars at the window for more than two minutes. If a customer orders something and it's going to take more than 2-5 minutes to get it ready the drive thru employee will have the customer pull forward and an employee will bring the food out to the customer's car when it's ready. Unless it's late at night after the restaurant's doors are locked. If it's late at night the car is supposed to remain at the window so that employees don't have to go outside to a customer's car. McDonald's dedicates parking spots that are close to the drive thru so that customers waiting on food can use them and so that the employees taking the food out to the cars can be close to the store and easily visible.

Basically it's meant to be more convenient for the customer and the employees.

Also the point of drive thru is allowing the customer to get food without having to leave their vehicle. Drive thrus dont guarantee that you won't have to wait on food. Expecting to always be able to just "drive thru" without having to wait is naive.

Frankly I'd rather wait 5 minutes to get fresh fries than get old fries immediately.