The in-person order taking is a much worse experience for the customer. Let me look at the damn menu board. It should not take any more time to prepare a meal than it takes for a car to progress from the order board to the window. I don’t see how them getting the order earlier (presumably the purpose of this) is helping in any way.
If you want chick fil a and value your time, the in store pickup is a much more efficient.
I do not want to be a CFA defender, because they really are shitty, but they have the logistics down to a science. The volume they push through a drive through puts other drive throughs to shame. To directly answer your question, the more they know about what orders are coming, the better prepared they can be. If they know the next 5 cars are ordering nuggets, they can put more nuggets and less patties in the deep fry (for example).
It’s terrible of them to make their employees do this shit in the cold and rain though. Just let the line be inefficient for a little bit, it’s not like the chicken craving cultists are going to leave the line.
Completely agree with this. They operate their drive through lines like a very well-greased machine. It’s extremely efficient and customers obviously have responded well to it. Would hate for CFA to ever militarize, they’d be a well-fed and very well-ordered militia.
They have a breathtaking modern technical stack at each franchise. They use ai camera tech to measure the “emptiness” of their various pans, which works with historical data and the incoming orders to automatically create store wide alerts about how much and when to add more chicken/etc to be cooked. They pull in tons of sensor data from basically everything in the stores to keep the lines moving, from the tills to door entry sensors to fry baskets, on and on.
Its all run on a small 3 computer cluster that each of 5000 stores gets that is redundant and self healing, and automatically shares data to corporate/etc.
I can tell you’ve never been in a Chick-Fil-A kitchen during lunch rush. That drive through is one of the most efficient in the industry and the BoH logistics are about as good as you can get. Most restaurants do over 200 cars per hour. They have significantly more employees making a much better wage than the industry average allowing them to meet the demand.
I fucking hate Chick-Fil-A for a lot of reasons, but you can at least be factual about your criticisms. Pizza isn’t even in the same league as other fast food, and is basically irrelevant. Low margin and low volume lead to most pizza places not having enough staff to handle a rush of orders.
I have the advantage of having worked on the corporate side of a lot of different restaurants, so I have a lot of behind the scenes knowledge. I have nearly 20 years combined experience between Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, and now Chick-Fil-A. That’s probably why I don’t eat fast food anymore.
The in-person order taking is a much worse experience for the customer. Let me look at the damn menu board. It should not take any more time to prepare a meal than it takes for a car to progress from the order board to the window. I don’t see how them getting the order earlier (presumably the purpose of this) is helping in any way.
If you want chick fil a and value your time, the in store pickup is a much more efficient.
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I do not want to be a CFA defender, because they really are shitty, but they have the logistics down to a science. The volume they push through a drive through puts other drive throughs to shame. To directly answer your question, the more they know about what orders are coming, the better prepared they can be. If they know the next 5 cars are ordering nuggets, they can put more nuggets and less patties in the deep fry (for example).
It’s terrible of them to make their employees do this shit in the cold and rain though. Just let the line be inefficient for a little bit, it’s not like the chicken craving cultists are going to leave the line.
Completely agree with this. They operate their drive through lines like a very well-greased machine. It’s extremely efficient and customers obviously have responded well to it. Would hate for CFA to ever militarize, they’d be a well-fed and very well-ordered militia.
They have a breathtaking modern technical stack at each franchise. They use ai camera tech to measure the “emptiness” of their various pans, which works with historical data and the incoming orders to automatically create store wide alerts about how much and when to add more chicken/etc to be cooked. They pull in tons of sensor data from basically everything in the stores to keep the lines moving, from the tills to door entry sensors to fry baskets, on and on.
Its all run on a small 3 computer cluster that each of 5000 stores gets that is redundant and self healing, and automatically shares data to corporate/etc.
For all the bigotry, its a crazy modern buisness.
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I can tell you’ve never been in a Chick-Fil-A kitchen during lunch rush. That drive through is one of the most efficient in the industry and the BoH logistics are about as good as you can get. Most restaurants do over 200 cars per hour. They have significantly more employees making a much better wage than the industry average allowing them to meet the demand.
I fucking hate Chick-Fil-A for a lot of reasons, but you can at least be factual about your criticisms. Pizza isn’t even in the same league as other fast food, and is basically irrelevant. Low margin and low volume lead to most pizza places not having enough staff to handle a rush of orders.
I have the advantage of having worked on the corporate side of a lot of different restaurants, so I have a lot of behind the scenes knowledge. I have nearly 20 years combined experience between Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, and now Chick-Fil-A. That’s probably why I don’t eat fast food anymore.
Huh? They have staged ordering and pickup. So the pickup is not a bottleneck.
In-store pickup, lol. The places by me are always so busy that there’s nowhere to park.