Drive-thru at dinnertime best avoided
A few considerations for your next trip to the drive-thru: If order accuracy matters to you, go at lunch. If you want greater odds of friendly employees, sandwich chains are the place to be.
These were among the findings of a new survey released Monday by QSR Magazine, a publication that closely tracks the nation's chain restaurants. Each year, QSR works with a research group to gather data on the performance of a set of well-known brands. Results for 2014 are based on 2,188 visits to 23 restaurants in three categories -- burgers, chicken and sandwiches -- and at five times of day -- breakfast, lunch, dinner, afternoon snack and late night.
Convenience is arguably the most common reason for choosing drive-thru over sit-down. Drive-thru regularly accounts for about two-thirds of sales at an American store operator that has windows. Measured by time of day, orders were correct 87.2% of the time, with lunch the best at 88.9%. Dinner was the worst, with 83.6% accuracy. By food type, sandwich chains performed the best, with 87.5% accuracy. Burger chains were the worst, at 85.2%.
On average, a drive-thru meal measured by time of day took 203.29 seconds, or 3 minutes and 23 seconds, from when the customer stopped at the ordering station until they got the order. QSR has changed its survey approach, including adding more restaurants, so even though this year's overall order time was worse than last year's 180.83-second average, the publication says they're not directly comparable. Still, QSR editor Sam Oches said in a press release that as chain restaurants try to add higher-end items to their menus, many stores worry that doing so "may be responsible for an ongoing slow-down" at their drive-thrus. In contrast, the 2013 results were about 8 seconds slower than 2012, which was a direct comparison.
The quickest time clocked this year was for afternoon snacks between lunch and dinner, at 173.39 seconds. Notably, the snack period also was the busiest time, with 1.98 cars tending to be in drive-thru lines. (When measured by category of food, rather than time of day, the average wait was 219.97 seconds.)
Breakfast was right behind at 174.88 seconds. And even though dinnertime was the least busy by far, with only 1.19 cars, the drive-thru at that hour was the slowest -- at 225.59 seconds, or about 3 minutes, 46 seconds. While sandwich chains were the greatest in terms of accuracy, waits were longer, coming in last among the restaurant categories in terms of speed at 239.88 seconds. Burger sellers were the fastest type at 203.75 seconds.
As for why dinner was the slowest, QSR's report said orders at that time of day can be larger and more complicated, and that, even if fewer cars are in line, the size of the order is the more important factor. The increased difficulty would also suggest a greater chance of a mistake with the order.
Oches said that "nobody expected the afternoon snack daypart to be the busiest, nor did we think it and the breakfast meal would be so much faster than the other dayparts."
Meanwhile, employees were at their most disagreeable at the snack meal, when 1.7% of orders were greeted by workers said to be "rude." However, only 1.1% of all times surveyed got the outright rude label. Employees were "very friendly" or "pleasant" 72.4% of the time.
Here, sandwich shops outpaced the others, as 83.9% of orders were presented by "very friendly" or "pleasant" employees. That's mainly because the "very friendly" judgment was found at a much higher rate than at burger and chicken shops.
Restaurants surveyed for the burger category included McDonald's (MCD), Wendy's (WEN) and Burger King (BKW), while the chicken category included KFC and Popeyes (PLKI). Chick-fil-A was in the sandwich segment, along with Arby's, Panera (PNRA) and others.
