Weird, but better than standing in the rain I guess 🤷♀️
What even do they need to be outside for? It’s a drive-through: aside from the arglbarglarglbarglarglbarglarglbargl of some monster diesel Dodge Ram killing the microphone it’s generally an “everyone is in a vehicle or building already” job.
There’s a couple of places I’ve seen that do this. Basically it just streamlines the process so once you get to the window they just have your food ready vs waiting 10 min for the granny in front of you to order then wait for her to get her food. I’m sure some industrial engineer can come in here and explain it better though.
Engineer here.
Basically, it’s all about workflow. With the drive through, you’ve got this system that is very linear. The result of that is a flow that can get incredibly backed up easily if one step takes a long time. And believe it it not, placing the order is often the slowest step. This is why many McDonald’s have put in 2 drive through lanes (while still keeping just one payment window and another pick up window which all cars must funnel through).
This basically allows more orders per minute to be collected, as well as preventing clogs due to grandma taking her goddamn sweet time to put in her order
Yeah, I’ve no idea but I try not to think too much about north American infrastructure and business structure, many of it seems illogical to me.
GONK GONK
GONG
I don’t know what those are, but I love standing in the rain and I hate getting wet. So that just looks incredibly nice
It’s probably incredibly humid and sticky too lol
cozy. And they’re getting paid for it too!
Yes but have you ever been stuck in a 1 foot square tent with yourself?
I’ve been stuck in a body with myself for a long time.
I’ve been stuck in myself my whole life man. I’ve also been stuck in other people, but not as much as I’d like.
You imagine farting in one of those things
Only source of heat.
Fairly certain I don’t
Fuuuuuccccck Chikfila
These poor people having to wait in the rain so boomers can order chicken sandwiches. It is called an app people.
Sure, boomers might not think about using an app to order fast food, but I would think anyone who cares about privacy also avoids restaurant apps.
Watch out the highschooler might find out you like waffle fries with your chicken sandwiches… Ooooo the implications
I’m more worried about the app scraping your entire phone and using said information to twist your political opinion to whatever they want. Like what happened during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It was never about the info you purposely send to the company.
Beef-Fil-A’s
I used to work at chick-fil-a. Those things sucked. They were hot and smelled of body oder. It was hard to do anything in them.
I can’t imagine them washing that thing regularly
I see huts with chicken legs like this: https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/fairy-landscape-hut-on-chicken-legs-vector-21808909. I guess it is fitting for Chick-Fil-A.
Owned by religious nutbags. Don’t eat here.
Rain hoods and bigotry.
Doing God’s work.
I’ve never actually “been” to Chick-Fil-A, not even when I didn’t know about their shitty beliefs. Popeyes was always more convenient and tastes great. Now that I know, I actively avoid CFA.
I have tasted it when other people bring it in for work or something, and I still don’t get the hype. It’s just ok and definitely not worth waiting in a long line for when there are so many other options.
Edit: I don’t know if these even exist anymore, but some Popeyes have/had a buffet. If you find one of these glorious chicken establishment unicorns, please take advantage of it. You won’t regret it.
The reason those guys are out there is to make sure there aren’t long lines. I hate the way it is set up but I have to give them credit that they can get people through faster than any other fast food joint around. They make McDonald’s look extremely slow at times.
Newer shake shacks do the same thing with the double drive through and roving CSAs, but im pretty sure they just cloned chick-fil-a’s process.
Yeah, that’s fair.
I agree, even when the line is wrapped around the building the wait rarely is ever that long.
And I know this is just pissing into the wind in this community, but CFA is amazing in my community. Yes, Popeyes sandwich is better, but the service level is next level at CFA. They pay well, treat their employees great (see photo), and they give back to the community. When the local owners were renovating their stores they went out seeking volunteer opportunities for their employees, them paid their employees for the time they spent volunteering. Plus the employees are just nice… compare that to the Popeyes employees who obviously hate being at work, are understaffed, and underpaid.
Yes, CFA has issues at the corporate level but on the local level it is an amazing employer and member of the community.
We have a local gang organization that does charity drives. Even if some of those individuals promoting a good public image weren’t involved, the organization goes as far as trafficking young children. Grew up around it unfortunately. Yet ironically, I have people vehemently defend them as arbiters of good like they’re vigilantes or something because they haven’t seen what radical effects these people are pushing into our world.
That’s much further on the scale of course, but we can ask the same question still: Is the good that this one meso-group supplies negate the evil that they’re supporting?
Could all of these wonderful people be working at another facility, providing you with the same quality of service minus the bad moral after-taste? Yes, but only if they’re obligated to work somewhere else. Otherwise, why change when they’re getting so much support from the people they serve?
I’ve read that the chicken Aldi sells in a red bag cooked in an air fryer is on par with CHICK-FIL-A. 🤷♂️
We got those, or some similar “it’s like chick-fil-a” chicken from there. I did not like it because it tastes like pickles.
I REALLY dislike the taste of pickles for some reason. I’ve seen people speculate that chick-fil-a brines their chicken in pickle juice, but either way if I get a sandwich of theirs without pickles, I don’t taste anything like I do with the store chicken. That goes for both the normal and the spicy sandwich.
I have experimented with similar recipes and pickle juice is the key to the taste and texture of chick fil a while brining.
pickle juice is awesome. pickles, pickle backs, pickles on sandwiches, everything. I feel sorry for gp
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.
In-store pickup, lol. The places by me are always so busy that there’s nowhere to park.
Agreed, I think its performative and cant speed things up. The food takes X amount of time to prepare no matter how fast you bury the exploited wage slaves in orders.
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.
Exactly, the kitchen isn’t some quantum superimposed space that can be made bigger to accomodate more sandwiches per hour, it’s not a fucking TARDIS or something. No, you have a max amount per hour, and not a single restaurant in the fucking country cares that there is an upper limit on what they can make. Nope, you, the workers, just need to move faster! Nevermind the limitations of physics, this is fast food and you’re a bad person for not being faster!
This has gotten even worse with the advent of internet orders. Go to your local Dominos and you may walk in just at the right time to hear the people at the counter losing their minds because five 20-pizza orders came in within seconds of each other, and every single one of those orders is expecting their order in “10-20 mins” because that’s what it said on the website.
The person whose order came in last is going to be waiting nearly an hour for their pizzas. Whose fault is this? Dominos corporate.
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.
