Chick-Fila’s Drive Thru

It’s 9:40 pm on a Saturday night. You’ve been sitting in the same spot for what feels like an eternity your foods gone cold yet the drive thru line is at a standstill. The line constricts all around the building and spills out into the street. Workers scatter, handing out food car to car as fast as they can making a lengthy trek to the back of the line just to run back to the window to do it over again. After what feels like forever the monstrous line finally moves .

This chick fila experience is all too common at the Monticello location. With the recent change in location came a variety of issues. We’ve experienced a noticeable increase in customer complaints “Longest drive thru wait ever. This is supposed to be Chick-fil-A. But got McDonald’s service. Never in my life have I ever had to wait over 20 minutes in the drive thru. Have never had to wait at even this location for this long.” from a yelp review. Ever since the new chick fil-a location opened the drive thru has been painfully slow.

The new Chick Fil A building opened in September and even that first day we had problems. The drive thru has a variety of fatal flaws that extend out to the rest of the building. For example, the order taking process while virtually unchanged from the previous location the way we take orders has the tendency to slow down the customer experience. If an employee happens to go too far back in the line to take an order the entire drive through could become frozen in place as the way through is too narrow to allow for cars to go around each other. The issues in the drive thru extend out to affect the employees in expo.

While the process of bringing food out to customers is more or less unchanged, there seems to be an increase in conflict between employees and customers. Very often customer complaints come in the form of yelling out their car window about the slow driver thru or how confused they are about the new lanes as if the average employee who’s just trying to do their job is in any way equipped to handle complaints at that level. Every once in a while, a customer will become completely irate and escalate to the point of harassing our expo workers which while completely unacceptable is strangely typical for working in fast food. The odd hostile interaction with a customer must always be met with civility and an apologetic tone as to keep in line with customer service standards. In other words, the employee must smile and bear it as we cannot hope to change the flawed operations put in place by our superiors.

Overall the new location and it’s drive thru has created wide spread problems and conflicts for those who work there.