Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
A lot of people say StarBucks coffee is bad, but it’s far better than the burnt motor oil sold at fast food places, gas stations, and donut shops. The upscale coffee competitors are even more expensive and never have a drive-thru.
Worse, donuts shops and gas stations never have real milk creamer — only the extremely artificial powdered stuff (not made from milk). Or they’ll sell a bad cappuccino for $5.
It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.
If this is true, then they don't have to worry about the order in which they process orders.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
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It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
It is incredibly frustrating cause you have to wait while they fulfill online orders.
They should have priority queues to ensure that certain order types take priority
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do wonder though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", if that would help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
Oh, mine lets you order online and then pick up in the drive through.
It's not my impression that online ordering for pick-up is massively popular here. We do it, because out side rush hours we can order, walk straight over and our food will be done a few minutes after we get there.
In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
Maybe that's part of the experience they're selling? - "you're a VIP, just look at the legion of minions rushing to serve you!" - but I find it a distasteful waste of time, and avoid going back.
No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.
At least my bank won the chargeback.
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.