Wendy's has quickest service, Chick-fil-A is most accurate. While the data changes a bit from year to year, the drive-thru study indicated that the average wait time for a Wendy's order was just seconds, the quickest in the field and more than one minute faster than Burger King. Drive-thrus are increasingly important to Starbucks. Having largely exhausted the potential to expand further into downtown locations where drive-thrus would be problematic or impossible, Starbucks is placing an emphasis on "off-highway kinds of locations" and "some of the remote areas around the country," Alstead said, to reach out to new customers.
It certainly doesn't hurt that drive-thrus allow Starbucks coffee shops to speed up service, thereby serving more people and hiking per-store profits. Panera studied drive-thrus for 10 years before opening one.
The fast-casual restaurant category, which has become a phenomenal success due to its mix of speedy service, customizable orders, and fresher and higher-quality fare, has been fairly reluctant to pull up to the drive-thru, so to speak.
One reason is the fear that the drive-thru cheapens the experience figuratively and literally, the latter because orders taken away in the car are prone to getting soggy or are otherwise less appealing than food fresh eaten on the spot.
Panera Bread , one of the earliest players in the fast-casual space, reportedly studied drive-thru options for a decade before finally introducing one in That was only after the company settled on a design that would hide drive-thru operations from the regular counter-serve customers they didn't want to disturb or distract anyone , and after developing special packaging that ensure "food integrity" in drive-thru orders.
Chipotle is a drive-thru holdout, and may never give in. Could they operate with an even smaller location? Starbucks has already announced they will open dozens of pickup-only stores. But then again, maybe drones will solve this issue for much less cost than building a dumbwaiter. Let us know what do you think in the comments below? Invest In A Drive-Thru:.
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Banks and grocery stores across the country were embracing the drive-thru model and here, at Coral Ridge National Bank in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a pampered pooch gets his biscuits to go. The snap dates to While smaller chains were capitalising on the drive-thru hype, fast food juggernauts were dragging their feet.
Burger King wouldn't embrace the drive-thru window until Instead, the brand, which began as Insta-Burger King, focused on a self-service model that relied on a piece of kit called "the Insta-Broiler", which cooked burgers super-fast.
An early store is pictured here. Fast food titan McDonald's was surprisingly slow on the uptake too. Through the late s and 50s, McDonald's instead pioneered the "Speedee Service System", where a streamlined menu was prepared super-quickly, and customers would walk up and order at a self-serve window.
Drive-thru service was not available, though. The super-fast service and moreish hamburgers at McDonald's meant the lack of a drive-thru didn't dim the chain's success in the s and 60s. Still, the amount of cars parked up in this circa s shot suggests punters would soon be impatient for a drive-thru fix. The first McDonald's drive-thru finally came in , in the same year as Burger King, and nearly three decades after Red's Giant Hamburg first rolled out their early version of the concept.
The chosen location was Sierra Vista, southern Arizona, and a sign still proudly touts the restaurant as a world first.
By the s, the drive-thru craze was catching on around the globe. The very first drive-thru restaurant in Europe pictured here opened in at the Nutgrove Shopping Centre in Rathfarnham in Dublin, Ireland. It was a McDonald's joint and it was branded "McDrive" in the hope of appealing to a European audience. The UK soon followed suit. Pictured here is the nation's first McDonald's drive-thru, which opened in Fallowfield, Manchester in late The concept soon piqued the interest of Brits and it wasn't long before more drive-thrus with golden arches began popping up across the country.
Back across the pond, in Canada, the drive-thru concept was gathering just as much momentum. Wendy's arrived in Canada in the s, while Tim Hortons, the country's most iconic quick-service brand, gained its first drive-thru in the s.
Rumour has it the drive-thru came about by accident, since the legendary chain took over an old fried chicken outlet that already had a service window. Of course, the place where it all began, the USA, continued to embrace the drive-thru concept into the s and beyond. By this point, drive-thru pharmacies, banks, liquor stores, grocery shops and, of course, fast food joints, pervaded the entire country.
This Illinois grocery store — the Dairy Market Express Drive-Thru in Lake Zurich — took the concept one extra step, with shoppers able to motor right through the middle of the store.
It's pictured here in Share the love.
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