6/5/2023 0 Comments Drive through![]() ![]() So, with 2 drive lanes you have 3 employees, therefore you need 30 cars to pay the costs. For the purpose of this example, you work at full capacity 8 hours. Now let's say you need 10 cars to pay your employees, and you have only one employee per station (taking orders and cashier). Maximize costs/benefitsĬonsider the cases mentioned in my first point. Being smart, you say to yourself: is the time I will spend here worth it? Quite probably not, so you move out to another place. ![]() Now you come with your car and see a long line of cars that gets to the road. If you want more drama, try to picture this with 3 kids yelling and you'll get the perfect nightmare (and obviously, this user will never get back, granted). Needless to say the amount of frustration will skyrocket. The other cars will grow impatient, and maybe even try to get out and go to another restaurant, causing trouble to the cars behind or getting stuck in the middle. The first 3-4 cars will just wait patiently. Since they're taking orders in parallel, it will take 12 minutes to each row to go through, plus 8 minutes for all cars to pay. Let's say we have 2 rows of 4 cars and it takes 3 minutes to each car to make an order, plus 1 minute to pay. Note: just like David Meister mentions in his great answer, this is based on Theory of Constraints The customer won't always notice but we do. I've always said that, in my restaurants, if something goes seriously wrong at any point in our morning setup, it takes us a full 24 hours to recover. If it's taking longer than those max times, my people make adjustments like taking problem customers out of that flow. I know how long it should take for the customer at the end of the line, too. I know how long it should take for a single customer at the head of the line to get through to checkout. This flow is just as important as anything else. Just like a plant, timing of operations is studied from before the restaurant opens to when a customer walks in the door to the time it closes. Fast food operations are small factories that produce packages of meals no matter what anyone wants you to believe. Second customer comes in but he's happy cause he's next! But the third customer in thinks, "Aw, man, how long is this going to take?"ĮDIT: The queuing theory, and all similar ideas, are very much applied to these things. First customer comes in and gets waited on right away. Of course, sometimes it's a matter of parking space and two lines prevents cars from spilling out into the entrance from the street. It's better to be third in line of two lines than sixth in line of one line. So it's partially psychological but combined with increase feedthrough it makes the customer experience better. In addition, it makes the line look shorter. And if one line gets bogged down by one customer, half of the other customers are in another line and continue to flow, hopefully. The slowest part in this queue is ordering. (I am not with McDonalds.) It all comes down to timing and shaving 10 or 20 seconds off the time you wait in line is worth having. The reason for two lanes is a matter of timing from McDonald's research into this that I read years ago. I am in the fast food business having owned five units for over 30 years but don't have a unit with two lanes. ![]()
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