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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

My complaint is that it isn’t even fast.

I had a Burger King gift card in my wallet when I arrived at the PATH terminal at the World Trace Center and after I walked out of the Oculus I saw a CHOPT salad restaurant across the street and a BK across the corner. BK was crowded inside and was emitting greasy fumes I could smell outside.

My calculation was that it could take most of 30 minutes to wait in line and get my food at the BK, at the CHOPT I punched my order into a tablet and had it in 3 minutes.

I worked at BK in the late 1980s and there they would try to have burgers ready in the steam tray and on the heat chute before you ordered them so you really could get it fast. Fast food restaurants don’t seem to do this anymore.

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Yep.

My favorite "fast food" place is an 8-decade-old neighborhood ice cream shop. They have a variety of good sandwiches in their refrigerator case, ready to grab & go. And none of 'em have the "opps, am I eating the wrapper?" chemo-plastic taste or mouth feel of modern fast food.

It led to waste, now they push don't assemble till ordered, the number crunching and metric pressure is absurd.

There's a small chain called Dick's in Seattle that still makes their burgers in an assembly line ahead of time. There's no customizing the order but the most expensive burger is 4.85 (2nd most is 2.95) and it's really fast. They're super popular so there's not much waste.

IANAEC (Evil Capitalist)...but my first thought is to keep number of slower-to-make menu items down, allow up to (say) 7% "made & unsold" waste on those, and donate the unsold ones to the Local Shelter (or whatever) every day for the tax write-off. Disappointing a cash customer costs far more than the wholesale value of a burger or two.

And maybe workers on harder-to-fill shifts get to take a few would-be-donated burgers home every day, too.

At BK in the 1990s we “did it” like so: burgers and buns went into a “broiler/steamer” machine which did the flame broiling on top and toasted the buns on the bottom, we would assemble burgers (regular size) and whoppers (XL) and put them in the steam tray, people at the whopper board and burger board would take them out of the steam tray and put the condiments on and put them in boxes in the heat chute.

Burgers could sit in either the heat chute or the steam tray for 10 minutes and we were supposed to throw them out if they went over that limit. Under normal conditions we didn’t throw a lot of them out but we would go to a purely on demand model on Sunday afternoons when we could sometimes go 20 minutes between customers.

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