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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

>then the 2020s could be the golden age of drive-thru tech.

>In 2019 the average McDonald's drive-thru took six minutes and 18 seconds, but recently the company trimmed that to five minutes and 49 seconds in 2020,

I mean i guess if you're in accounting and your sole goal is to make sure you've saved every penny possible then yeah i suppose trimming drive thru time down by around 30-40 seconds must seem like the golden age...and i guess in the next 5 years, automation will save the mcdonalds corp another minute or two and increase their profits by a few million and their board will be happy.

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If you’ve been in an In and Out burger drive thru multiply that by twenty cars ahead of you. That is indeed golden.

Ordering isn't the bottleneck at In n Out, it's the food made fresh, sometimes for custom orders. The menu itself couldn't be much simpler. The kids taking down the orders work quickly and are always at the end of the line. That they're friendly humans and not a confused AI is an added benefit.

On the other hand this should work for McDonalds, where nobody's expecting friendliness or much of anything; it's basically a feed trough.

Time is the only resource that is limited for all people. If over the course of my life, drive throughs getting shorter cumulatively save me many hours, I appreciate that.

When I'm on my way to work and a drive-through saves me 30-40 seconds compared to what it did last year, I appreciate that. I'm often rushed in the morning.

> i suppose trimming drive thru time down by around 30-40 seconds must seem like the golden age...

I suspect that this is largely pretend savings. Since locations are pressured to game this metric, for any order that they think might take too much longer than the median drive-thru time, they will (1) send customers from the drive-thru line to a parking spot then (2) bring their food out 5-10 minutes later. This can easily double customer wait time, and the food is often noticeably worse for the delay. It's a terrible customer experience.

I dunno, years ago, i learned something that stuck. I worked in a grocery store, we stocked those 4L ice cream buckets, the year i took over the frozen food section, dairyland decided to remove the handles on their buckets...people lost their shit. Like honestly, i had old ladies flipping out at me screaming because those bucketed handles were the only reason why they bought that ice cream.

So one day, i asked the dairlyand rep why...he told me someone figured out they could save 1¢ per bucket by removing the handle...this added up to millions of dollars a year....

Yes decisions like this are made on the basis of mere cents that add up to millions...

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