Drive Through Traffic Jams

On a recent trip from Cookeville, Tennessee to Clinton, Tennessee I encounter 2 of the absolute slowest "fast" food places I have seen. In Crossville Tennessee I found a McDonald's off of interstate 40 that seems trapped in slow motion. We gave up on the egg mcmuffin my wife wanted and continued on 40. Somewhere between Oak Ridge and Clinton we became trapped in the Taco Bell Drive Through that Time Forgot. Thanks to those 2 stops we lost the 45 minutes of spare time we gave ourselves and were actually about 10 minutes late. While stuck in the hell that is a drive though in August in a car without a working air conditioner, I exponded once again on my theory about the double window drive through.

You see, I don't think the fast food joints that use two windows do it to speed things up, I think they do it to take the last possible option away from the customer. You see, traditionally, if there was only an order point and a window where you paid and got your food, if the line was slow, you could almost always pull out and leave. If you pull in with 25 minutes of a 30 minute lunch break left and order a burger, fries, and drink and 15 minutes later you are still 3 cars away from the window, you need to leave and be able to grab a beef jerkey stick and drink from a convienence store to make it through the day. The double window drive through doesn't speed this up any. To make a 2 window drive through work efficiently to speed up traffic, you need a minimum of 4 people staffing it. You need one person taking orders, one person taking money and giving back change. one person carrying food to the window, and one person filling drinks and handing out the food. I don't know of a single place locally that uses more than 3 people, and most make do with two. Most places make the person taking money and making change take the orders to. That way, one register is all that is needed, but if it is busy, he has trouble taking money and making change because of the orders coming in. This can really slow down both order taking and money collecting. Now some of our local chain food shacks use two people on the second window, but some make the drink filler and food hander fetch and sack the orders, this really slows stuff down.

Now the local McDonalds uses the double window system on all it's local stores. The local Burger Kings have the double windows, but only one actually uses them and only during busy periods. I can't tell a difference in service speed. Dairy Queen and Jack in the Box both use only 1 window and aren't any slower in service on the average. I believe the real purpose of the first window is to get your money quick, so you won't leave the line if it is slow. Even if you do, they got paid for the food. I mean, we eat fast food because it is quick, convienent, and consistant, not because it tastes good. That's why we are fat, lazy and in a bad mood. Now we are being manuevered into having to put up with bad service from underpaid wage slaves. It sucks.