Food Theory: STOP Using the Drive-Thru!

I don't really eat fast food anymore but I always used to just check the contents of the bag before driving away from the window. There's no law that says you have to leave immediately.

MatPat is just speed running theories that include large quantities of fast food while he can still use lunch as a tax write off

The fast-food restaurants' "Chefs" You sir paid some major respect here.

I work in fast food and I can add some insight. I think the issue is not necessarily with comprehension [although there is some of that], it's with points of potential failure. Think of it like a tube. A long single tube can pass water through with only points of failure at either end. A segmented tube connected at regular intervals has many more points of failure at each connecting point on top of having the issue at both ends. Fast food places are similar. They usually have 3 people putting the food together for efficiency; One person toasting buns, one dressing the burger, one putting meat in the burger. One person cooking the meat, another entirely for chicken. One person putting together fries. Two or three people collecting the food and putting it in the bag. Usually staff are doing this in tandem with doing other jobs. Someone collecting drinks may be taking orders, or making ice cream/shakes. Another person who's working the line may need to leave to get out fries or other stock. As a result you have too many people interacting with an otherwise simple process with multiple different people acting as multiple points of failure. Lack of communication, unclear communication, tiredness from working inconsistent shift patterns and working on a hot grill/fry station all results in a recipe for failure. The easiest solution is to slow the process down by enforcing double checking at each stage to make sure things are correct. However, this would slow down the process which customers wouldnt be happy about and neither would the company as it would affect their bottom line. Through internal metrics workers are incentivised and business owners penalised for working slower, even if it ends up more accurate. There is a time limit on how long someone can be in a drive through, how long you should spend making an order and these time limits are reinforced with obfuscation of information. For example, if an order is off the screen - it is pending. Which if it goes to 6+ is stressful. rather than allowing employees see the orders and make the easier orders to get them out quicker, some businesses have intentionally sabotaged this information by only allowing 2 orders to appear on screen. This means that employees are completely unable to see a single cheese burger order because there are 2 orders ahead of it that may be 4+ items long. This same obfuscation applies for if an order is waiting for a specific ingredient. If you hold the order it blocks a slot of visibility. If you serve the order, you can no longer see what items were on the order unless you recall it which again blocks other orders.

Sir, this is a Wendy

This is a pretty solid video. However, an extremely important variable (im a fast food employee) that was not mentioned in this video is the fact that employees are on a TIMER for every single order. Corporate expects employees to get their drive-thru orders out around 3 minutes or less, any longer, and you're in the red zone. Now, 3 minutes is doable for sure, but when Suzy Q comes and orders 5 combos for her family, all with modifications, employees are going to rush to get the order out on time. Rushing is where the mistakes really come in. It's hard to make food quicky while reading an order that takes up an entire screen with modifications all in tiny, unorganized fonts. Because of this, it's incredibly easy to miss a modification. Personally, I despise the timer system because it expects employees to work under pressure while maintaining the highest quality, no matter how complicated the order may be. I honestly wouldn't mind waiting 5 minutes if my food came out correctly, but corporations see that as a huge nono.

I work at a fast food restaurant, orders are always wrong because we’re in such a rush to get things out quickly, we basically get punished for double checking. Corporate wants no mistakes but puts more pressure on the bosses of the stores to get their drive through times better, and less about order accuracy. At my restaurant they want from the moment the customer enters the drive through, orders and leaves to take under 2:30… which is near impossible

Ever since the kiosks were introduced, I've only used them when ordering fast food. We have them in McDonald's (obviously), our local fast food chain Hesburger and a few other chains. They're great!

As a worker at a McDonald's a huge part of the incorrect orders is the pressure placed on us by corporate to stay under a certain time limit, as well as having to deal with kiosk, mobile, door dash, front counter, and parked orders all at once.

As a fast food worker there are a few things I've noticed, firstly a lot of places are reducing the amount of workers on the floor. This means that there is more stress on those in the building, even our drive through often only has one person working it, both taking orders and tendering them out. Second, a lot of people are just trained on it for a couple days, and left to do it on their own with almost no supervision, again because there is less workers on the floor. A lot of times its the newer employees making the mistakes, and a lot of new employees haven't always had the greatest work ethic, and so just get cycled through like crazy. Sometimes its almost twice a week I see new names on the schedule, and within a few weeks they're gone, oftentimes without me having ever even seen them. Basically its just a constant flow of the above issues. :\

i’ve always used the kiosks because i hate talking to people and i can’t bother with telling them every customisation, and theres only been one mistake so far, when i was ordering with friends. never rlly understood why people were complaining until now

I worked at McDonald's in the 80's. I was a team leader for the drive through. We had the fastest drive through in the state. Our lunch rush window timer was never more than 20 seconds and we never "parked" anyone. Most orders were complete in less than a minute, from pull up to the speaker to departure. In any given week, we would have one or maybe two errors at the drive through. So what was different? First, we all made 150% of minimum wage. Second, we had food ready to serve, in the warmer bin. Food wasn't made to order. It was still fresh, because anything more than 10 minutes old got discarded. We were very good at anticipating demand and having popular items ready to go. Third, the ordering culture has changed. It was rare to get custom orders back then. Now, everyone wants it their way. Fourth, we all spoke English. There was no communication breakdown.

MatPat has been here since basically the beginning of youtube, ruining our childhood since 2011. We’ll miss you, man, and that is NOT just a theory

That "6 MatPat theories remain" is scarier than all FNaF jumpscares combined

In the UK, McDonald’s orders should be more accurate in the drive through as there should be a “checker”, but a lot of the time this is the first position to be dismissed when there’s not enough staff

Another good advantage for using app based ordering is that you don’t have to keep re-creating your special preferences. They’re usually stored in the app and you just go to your previous order and pick them. This even protects me from getting an order wrong because I forgot to add or omit something.

Pre-bumping tickets is the problem. I’ve worked in fast food for years across multiple chains, and the problem is that, now more than ever, companies are placing tons of pressure on employees about time from pulling up to leaving the drive through. Every major chain tracks car time, and a lot of them track time in the drive through, to time out. They decide a certain time that’s “normal” and any order longer than that is an issue. Meaning the time it takes for your one sandwich, they expect the same time on the next ticket with 6 combos and 4 extras. This causes employees to “pre-bump” tickets where they read the ticket then bump it off the screen so the system thinks it’s done and times are lowered, however doing this leaves lots of room for error as you would assume.

As someone with some years of fast food management under their belt, I can say that the main consistency that gave you your results is speed. Fast food chains (especially McDonald's) push really hard for drive thru speed. From the time you order until the time you leave the pickup window, they expect you to be in and out in a very short time. This is why food you get in the drive thru may look more sloppy, and are more prone to mistakes. The faster you go, the more likely you are to make those mistakes. This is why all of your other order methods were better. The person/people on the "inside" part of the table (as in, they focus on making dine-in orders, where as the other side is drive thru), make curbside, doordash/uber, mobile, kiosk and front counter orders. This sounds like a lot, but the big difference is they are not pushed to be as fast as the drive thru side. Less pressure, less stress, less need to get the orders off their screen in a few seconds. So using these avenues to order and getting fewer mistakes lends itself to the fact that they weren't made by the people being pushed to go as fast as they can.

If you've never worked this type of job, then you have no idea how difficult it actually is. It's an INCREDIBLE convenience to just be able to sit in your car, drive around a building, and within a few minutes have a meal prepared for you, and given to you through a window. For the convenience, you have to accept that it will often be wrong...whenever you make something more convenient on one side (customer), you're making it that much less convenient and difficult on the other side (workers). By definition, more speed will=less accuracy. Imagine at your job, if your boss made you rush and do it as fast as you possibly can, all the time..how many mistakes would you make?

the automated kiosks are the main reason for me to go to a fast food place like this. no stress, no social interaction and also allways knowing how much it will cost and what seasonal special they currently have.