What tunnel vision does to a mf
Everyone behind the silver car at the parking lot entrance is illegally blocking the road. Regardless of the car culture problem or OP’s disingenuous use of a CoViD era image out of context, those people needed to go away. If you can’t get your coffee without parking in the street, you don’t get coffee at that location at that time. Safety is more important than someone getting their sugar/caffeine fix.
The legality really depends on the jurisdiction. Where I live, it is 100% the business responsibility to ensure this doesn’t happen, and if it does, there are big fines for the business, the customer is not at fault.
Plenty of things the business could do to reduce this, such as making people park up after ordering (a very popular option where I live), increasing prices to reduce their demand, having a digital queue system, removing the drive-through altogether, etc.
Business passes small bribe to local politician
“No longer our problem”
This is probably during COVID when the inside was off limits.
Plenty of people still use the drive through, but the complete lack of anyone in the carpark is sus.
Former “partner”(ugh) circa 2015 here
Back when I walked for the bux, 5 years before covid, this was my daily drive thru experience. My store averaged about 6 grand (thats about 700 customers) on DT alone during our morning rush, 6 hours straight of underfilled cars starting their day with caffeine dessert.
This specific store could be a covid thing, but empty lobbies with cars wrapped around the building has kinda been starbie’s MO for the last decade or so that they’ve been transitioning away from “third place” mindset to “oh fuck we’re competing with McDicks mindset”
I see this kind of thing regularly at my local Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers restaurant when it hits dinner time. The cars wrap around the building and block other traffic.
Same for the DQ where I live.
This would be a believable theory if I didn’t see huge lines of cars outside fast food restaurants every day before and after COVID.
Is this Starbucks in the middle of 4 road intersection
They really will put them anywhere and everywhere lol.
Yeah how else are you gonna get there /s
Well. Some places don’t offer counter service and their doors are locked. You have to use the drive thru. Otherwise I agree with you except I don’t get to even talk to a human, I am directed to a kiosk. And they flash a tip option. A tip for what?
Otherwise I agree with you except I don’t get to even talk to a human, I am directed to a kiosk.
Honestly I’m a big fan of this. If I’m eating at a fast food restaurant, I’m having a bad day. And if you are working at a fast food restaurant, I feel odds are that you are having a bad day, too. Why should we inflict our bad days on each other?
And they flash a tip option. A tip for what?
I’m confused as to why people are consistently so upset by this. What happens is obvious. A restaurant buys some POS software to plug into their checkout system. Since the software is used in many different restaurants with many different needs, it has an option for tipping. The person installing the software sees the option and says “hey, if someone wants to give us more money, why not give them the option?”, checks a box on a config screen they will never open again, and then goes to lunch. Just select “No Tip” and move on with your life.
Hardworking appliances depend on tips to provide electrons to their families. If you don’t tip the kiosk that kiosk might go home and have to explain to it’s toaster that they can only afford to use the low power settings.
If there’s a line like this in the drive through I just move on. The inside is gonna be even slower than just waiting for drive through.
I commonly see these drive thru lines and walk inside. No line.
Idk every time I’ve gone inside when a line is like this there won’t be many people inside but the order will still take forever for some reason.
That’s because there are 3 or 4 cars in the line between the order kiosk and the window who have already ordered before you walked in the door. When you walk in, you jump the line of cars before the order kiosk. But there aren’t separate queues for counter and drive thru in the kitchen. They just see a list of orders in the order in which they were received, and process orders more or less FIFO.
If there are cars behind the order kiosk, you are almost certainly getting your order faster than if you had joined at the end of the line.
And their order priority:
- uber eats orders that pile up for hours
- drive through customers
- attending to some other random task
- i dont know but it sure feels like there should be more items here
- you a customer who ordered in person
I can almost guarantee that they make orders in the order they are received, more or less. So door dash gets their orders first, because they ordered online before they showed up. Then the drive thru orders get made before yours because there are 4 cars in line between the order kiosk and the window - they already ordered, and are waiting for their order to be filled before you walked in the door. For some reason, there is always someone in the drive thru line who is ordering for their whole office or a Mormon family or something.
The drive thru has 2 bottlenecks. Ordering and payment/delivery. Thus, the drive thru will have a much more consistent pace - there is always someone waiting to order, and always someone waiting to have their food handed to them. Since this is the case, there is always someone assigned specifically to this task, sitting in the drive thru window with a mic on. The cash registers, on the other hand, are far more efficient. Ordering and payment happen in the same step, and food is delivered simply by putting it on the counter. Multiple registers mean multiple orders can be taken at once. This means the line inside can be cleared quickly, which means it is less consistent, which means the staff often forgets to check it - especially since staff taking orders will quickly reallocate to making orders once the line is cleared. Add to this, taking orders inside is when a staff member must interact face-to-face with a customer - well known as the least enticing part of any customer service job. So it is easy for a staff member to see customers at the till and procrastinate on taking their orders, since there is more enjoyable work to be done.
There isn’t some kind of conspiracy to make walk-in customers’ experience as bad as possible. Fast food restaurants are evil capitalist money making machines, and their incentive is to make you as happy as possible per net dollar earned. If you really want to get your order fast, just order online before you show up. Then walk in the door and grab your order off the counter like a door dasher. If you insist on getting your order from the counter, realize that you are still getting your order faster than you would in the drive thru - you are just suffering from the illusion that they are prioritizing the drive thru since you aren’t counting the cars in line that ordered before you.
I’ve been places where it seems people who order their stuff in the store but to-go still consistently get their food in half the time as people who ordered earlier but ordered it dine-in.
I know there’s a simple explanation for it. But there’s another simple solution: if you are in person, you get service first. You took the time to enter the restaurant and can see the service being performed - so you should get priority.
if you are in person, you get service first. You took the time to enter the restaurant and can see the service being performed - so you should get priority.
Again, fast food restaurants are the physical manifestation of platonic capitalist greed. Please explain your theory on how this change would improve profitability, and why such a change would be worth the risk it imposses when the existing system has been working for decades.
Why is walking into a restaurant superior to driving through?
Quicker in this instance, is what they’re implying. Due to the line.
Problem is, the staff will commonly still prioritize the cars and you’ll still wait. Maybe not as much if you got in the end of the queue, but still longer than you’d expect.
I can do a mobile order before I even get there and just wait for it at the counter
You point of order does not affect the maximum throughput, I guess.
But it’ll be earlier in the pipeline
Is nobody mentioning the fact that there are 4 lane roads surrounding the entire coffee shop? Like thats absolutely the least or one of the least efficient ways you could do urban planning. In areas similar to this where I live, the block sizes are at least like 5x wider and longer than whatever this is.
They needed to spend millions to add an extra lane so it could handle the queue to the coffee shop. Unfortunately there was nothing left in the budget for bike lanes, it just wasn’t a priority.
People were getting annoyed at the queue, so they kept adding one more lane?
Nah, they probably added more all around to make it “more convenient” for drivers to keep going straight and still get to the many different destinations possible, but they could just have one road and the drivers could head around a roundabout or something.
Great point, what sort of a hellscape is that!?
Maybe we all should create a MicroNation ?
Until you realize that they purposefully understaff and now your front counter guy has to prioritize drive thru times over your order because that’s the only metric corporate measures.
Because my car is where all my stuff is. Air condition, my phone showing YouTube already plugged in, I’m sitting instead of standing, my massage seats are on, I don’t have to see and more importantly smell anyone else, I don’t have to fight dashers inside to get my food that they thought was their order. For starters most of those reasons.
Not to excuse it but some restaurants prioritize drive through over the people who order inside.
Was this taken during covid lockdowns when the indoor section was closed and there was no other option?
Yes, definitely. I remember this exact picture.
Without cars, plenty of those businesses wouldn’t be able to have customers and would have gone bankrupt because of it.
This is a misinformation post made to circlejerk about shitting on cars.
There are plenty of reasons to shit on them, this one isn’t it.
Okay but that’s assuming the drive thru system is the only way to handle distanced transactions. They could have a counter with a wall they push your food through so that people could stand in line without having this ridiculous line blocking traffic. Back during covid my family got a lot less fast food because I don’t drive so they literally couldn’t serve me, and also my mom just loathes the drive thru experience with a burning passion.
i think so. found this article
edit: and this
Lotta places are just like this anyway.
A decent espresso machine is like $100.
No it isn’t, a $100 machine cannot make espresso even if the box claims it does, unless you go used, the minimum for a machine that can make espresso is like $600.
Please continue to believe it costs $600 to force some steam through a puck of coffee.
