With the possible exception of that 79-year-old woman who burned her groin with McDonald's coffee back in the '90s, I'd wager that few in the general public give drive-thrus a second thought. Fast-food executives, on the other hand, are always thinking about drive-thrus.
For them, this is an important time of year — it's when the 2008 Quick-Service Drive-Thru Performance Study comes out. The annual survey of car service comes from the folks at QSR, "the magazine of quick serve restaurant success." The biggest news of this year's study is the fact that Chick-fil-A retained its #1 spot among the 25 leading fast-food companies offering drive-thru service. McDonald's came in a close second, with Burger King in third, and Taco Bell, KFC, White Castle, and others all leading down to a sad last-place finish by Popeye's.
How, you may wonder, does one qualify the drive-thru experience? That turns out to be a holistic process. Insula Research, which conducted the study, utilized four criteria — service time, order accuracy, speaker clarity, and menuboard appearance. The data it collected reveals more than just Chick-fil-A's continued dominance of the drive-thru market. Researchers found, for example, that only one chain — Del Taco — provided a napkin, straw, and correct change with every order; that "beverage fulfillment" is the weakest area of order accuracy; and that 38 percent of researchers detected the absence of a "pleasant demeanor" among drive-thru employees.
Every drive-thru owes whatever soul it has to Harry and Esther Snyder. In 1948, the Snyders opened the first drive-thru in Baldwin Park, California. Their In-N-Out Burger was a variation of the carhop model that had previously been the only connection between fast food and the automobile. With the Snyders' creation, customers would no longer have to wait the time it took a waitress to bring a hamburger from the restaurant to the parking lot; those seconds were regained as customers began pulling up to the restaurant directly, making fast food even faster. The drive-thru model then spread beyond food service, eventually speeding up what one can only assume had been the previously tedious processes of banking, developing film, and getting married.
In today's competitive drive-thru market, though, "fast" is a relative term. Just ask Randy Kibler, CEO of the Bojangles' chain. The chicken-and-biscuits restaurant was second only to Wendy's in this year's measure of service time, dropping over 38 seconds from 2007 to 2008. To Kibler, such a push is a no-brainer. "If you're in our industry and you're not trying to work on drive-thru speed of service," he told QSR, "you probably shouldn't be in this business." (Reducing service time, to be sure, can be a deal with the devil. QSR, ever the pragmatist, pointed out that Bojangles' improvement could be attributed to a decline in customers, and at the very least coincided with a fall in what's known as "order accuracy.")
I have a strong trust in scientific, systematic analysis. I wanted to see for myself, though, the differences that Insula's research revealed. I had never really thought all that much about what constitutes a positive drive-thru experience. If, for example, you wanted a Beef 'n Cheddar, would Arby's so-so service time (162.86 seconds) or middling accuracy rate (90.97%) have any bearing on your craving for a soft onion roll soaked with melted cheese spread? On paper, these drive-thrus were all over the map. In practice, how different could they be?
I decided to visit each end of the drive-thru quality continuum: Chick-fil-A and Popeye's. Chick-fil-A, I'm happy to report, was as efficient as promised. An awning spanned the distance between the speaker and my car, a touch that proved to be unnecessary the sunny day I visited, but one that I'm sure would have been welcome in rain. The menuboard was easy to navigate — it presented each item as a meal, above prices for a sandwich alone or as part of a combo. (Displaying combos is VERY important to Fred Exum, CEO of the Krystal chain, whose menuboards received a perfect score in the survey. "We have this idea that everything has to be on the menuboard," Exum told QSR. "I'm not sure that's really true. I'm not sure the vast majority of consumers using the drive-thru care about that little one off item you've got stuck down in the corner.")
The gentleman who took my order over a static-free speaker was for the most part pleasant — I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich, and when I switched to the combo his "What soda?" sounded a bit curt. Ellen, an older woman with dangly bracelets greeted me at the window. She, along with the entire staff inside, was dressed in Philadelphia Phillies gear to celebrate the local team playing in the World Series. Serving me, she said, was her pleasure.
I parked to inspect my order and found it to be 100% accurate: sandwich, fries, soda, napkin, straw, and BBQ sauce packet. Total wait time? Zero seconds! In fact, the only one slowing down the process was me, what with my confusing "entree" for "combo" back at the menuboard.
It was on a high note, then, that I drove to a nearby Popeye's. Let me say that I really, really wanted Popeye's to prove QSR wrong. I felt bad seeing it there at the bottom of the list. I hoped that it would not only match Chick-fil-A's service, but possibly surpass it. I like underdogs.
My hope, alas, was short-lived, as hope too often is. I wanted to consider each restaurant as equally as possible, so I ordered the fried chicken sandwich (Popeye's, it turns out, does not offer any non-fried chicken).
"We're out of the chicken sandwich, at least for today," the young lady at the other end of the speaker told me. (Note that this was noon, so either a) somebody forgot to order more fried chicken patties; b) there had been an unexpected rush on fried chicken sandwiches around 11 a.m.; or c) nobody had cooked any yet, and they didn't want to further bring down Popeye’s already abysmal drive-thru reputation by slowing wait time even further.)
Hoping to maintain some sense of control, I asked if they had any other sandwich — the one I ordered was the only one shown on the menuboard, and Fred Exum's advice reminded me that there could be a sandwich that Popeye's left off of it.
I heard the young lady whisper something to a co-worker, and then she told me that they had a Delta Mini. I asked what a Delta Mini was. "There isn't a picture of it on the menu?" she asked. I told her I couldn't see one. "It's two chicken fingers on a bun with some kind of sauce," she told me. I ordered one, along with mashed potatoes (the closest thing to fries), and a Coke. "You know it's a really small sandwich, right?" she asked. I told her that was OK.
I couldn't read her name tag when I pulled around to the window. While Chick-fil-A prints its employee's name tags, Popeye's lets its workers write their names themselves, and I couldn't read her handwriting. And where Chick-fil-A listed Ellen's name on my receipt, Popeye's referred to their associate simply as CSHR #3. She was also dressed in the standard Popeye's polo shirt, and not in anything that reflected the region. She was still as nice as Ellen, though.
When I parked to inspect my order, I found that it, too, was 100% accurate: Delta Mini, mashed potatoes, soda, napkins (twice as many as Chick-fil-A!), and straw. And the "some kind of sauce" turned out to be pretty good, too. (Subsequent research would find that corporate is equally evasive about the Delta sauce, describing it as "a special spicy flavor of Louisiana combined with a tasty cream sauce.")
In the end, Insula's rankings proved to be fairly accurate, at least in terms of service among these two individual restaurant experiences. In some ways, though, they were not so different from one another. The drive-thrus I visited were melancholy reminders that there are people who would rather eat in a parked car, staring out over an expanse of asphalt, than among other people in a restaurant. That there are people whose jobs necessitate their driving with greasy bags of food stuck between their legs. And that there are others whose job it is to get that bag there even faster, and sometimes their employers think of them as CSHR #3.
But for fast-food executives, the only thing that matters is the fact that in a 60-day period, 88% of survey respondents had visited a drive-thru anywhere from one to 20+ times. So it's onward and upward with drive-thru improvement. For the Popeye's, Dairy Queens, and Whataburgers wallowing at the bottom of the list, all is not lost: On November 11, QSR and Insula are offering a webinar that will identify best practices in drive-thru management and offer a Q&A with executives from the more successful operators. At the same time, drive-thru solutions provider HM Electronics is developing technology that will allow customers to phone or text orders; they will park in designated spots and have their food delivered by employees who, in a nod to the carhops of old, will use video, magnetic, or possibly ultrasonic detection to know when customers have arrived.
On reflection, I could never have guessed that fast-food would one day be coupled with magnetism. But I guess the Snyders couldn't have known that their invention would ever be coupled with a webinar. Drive-thrus, it turns out, are surprising like that.
Jesse Smith is the executive editor of Table Matters.
Drive-thru photograph by jensteele via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Food Court" photography from Paul Keleher via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.
