Opinion Column From LinkedIn on Restaurant Drive-Thrus Driving People Away

Etta, Editor in Chief

Etta, Editor in Chief

Opinion Column — Drive Thrus Driving People Away — see linkedin article.  This looks at how fixing one thing often breaks another. Posted as well on kioskindustry.org

Craig Allen Keefner  Consultant Self-Service Technology 65 articles

Much of my career has been devoted to websites and internet properties. High Availability and Burst Capacity are two of the big factors considered.

Having a nice website being overwhelmed by large traffic and sometimes a Denial of Service attack is very common and any internet manager worth his or hers salt has experienced that situation, and vowed to mitigate it in the future.

It’s not surprising them that when I drive by a Chick-Fil-A restaurant (or an In&Out) I see long lines, closed dining rooms, and cars driving off after getting in line and deciding they will just get a Wendys or whatever.

I use Drive-Thrus. My ad hoc experience is that they mess up the order/food probably 25% of the time, and I don’t like handing them my credit card.

There are many factors driving this and the pandemic is just one.

Drive-Thrus are Driving People Away

From Business Insider November 2021

  • Workers in fast food and full-service dining say to-go orders are making their jobs harder.
  • Drive-thru and to-go orders exploded during the pandemic as dining rooms closed.
  • Some workers say they can’t keep up normal standards with multiple orders coming in each minute.

ZDnet wrote up Chick-Fil-A recently as well

In a recent interview with the Atlanta Business Journal, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy admitted: “We estimate about 30% of the people are driving off, driving away, because the lines are so long.”

Chick-Fil-A has tried the Los Angeles approach to mitigating traffic (add more lanes) and has found that doesn’t work, as it hasn’t worked for Los Angeles.

But Chick-fil-A has some particular challenges. It’s often been set in very successful ways. It’s very often been voted the slowest drive-thru — could it be that its employees try and be nice to customers?

In fact, rather than instantly inject technological enhancements, Chick-fil-A has sometimes resorted to just building another Chick-fil-A down the road.

Sadly, Cathy confessed: “We found that doesn’t solve the problem.”

Certainly the lack of interest in being an employee for certain companies has compounded the problem. Example would be the difference among McDonalds franchisees who set their minimum wage. Why work for $9.50 when you can work for $15?

Solution Tactics

Ghost Kitchens is a big trend.

Ghost kitchen as Google Trend chart for past 5 years. Yes it has increased.

I liked the long article on NRF and Ghost kitchens.

Small wonder, then, that ghost kitchens were a $43.1 billion industry in 2019, and expected to reach $71.4 billion by 2027, according to Hospitality Technology.

The most promising and explainable (though not understood) solution is AI. While finding a home in retail inventory and backoffice processes, it seems to be still a shiny button when it comes to direct interaction with consumers. Sounds good. Limiting out of stocks, save time and increase speed of stocking. You might have to wait for that boat off the coast of California before any of that matters of course.

Problem with AI is the very problem it needs to be able to handle, it is totally unable to do. That would be nuanced orders. Just ask yourself how AI conversations either on a website or over the phone inevitably lead to the plea “Customer Service” aka as a real person who can understand the nuance of your situation.

And for sure there are majority of requests. Amica Insurance handles “majority requests” like I need to print a new insurance card by putting a link to do so right on the homepage, thus eliminating 100s of phone calls (or time navigating/searching website).

Robots and Automated Food Preparation is another “maybe this can help?”. See CNBC article Restaurants prep for long-term labor crunch by turning to robots to work the fryer, shuttle food to tables

Panera Bread set a great example before it went multichannel. First thing it did was modernize its kitchens to increase efficiency and thruput. It increased available capacity first. Blaine Hurst was instrumental in that. Investing in infrastructure to support higher number of transaction would seem to make a lot of sense.

Right now mostly what I see are restaurants flailing a bit with the Los Angeles traffic solution.

Related Posts

Announcement from The Industry Group

The Industry Group Announcement

The Industry Group logo

The Industry Group logo

The Industry Group announcement —  is a network of news dedicated to technology in the self-service market. This includes websites, magazines and social sites such as LinkedIn

Here is a list of news we cover:

Magazines We Publish

The Industry Group and More Web Content Changes

The Industry Group Comes To Life

the industry group

And we do beer taste tests

I’ve created a top level url for all the sites that I manage.

Around 25 these day and they range from rockwork to patient kiosk to POS to kiosk to others.

The top level URL is industrygroup.org and that means the Kiosk Industry Group and others fall underneath that umbrella.

A short description of some follows:

Website Verticals include:

  • Digital Signage Blog — more accurately interactive digital displays but we are stuck with “digital signage” for now.
  • Menu Board — here we focus on digital menus, indoor and outdoor. Panasonic and LG are two of our members and contribute.
  • i-Telehealth — remote health monitoring and treatment by consumers themselves, sometimes with assistance
  • Touch Screens — touchscreens come in sizes from 5″ to 100″. You have LED fine pitch which are only displays
  • PatientKiosk — patient registration kiosks in healthcare along with EHRs like Epic with Welcome Kiosk are covered
  • Digital Business — looking for software like browser lockdown or commercial grade tablets and All-In-One computers?
  • Automated Retail — lockers and smart vending along with innovative drive thru and retail robotics
  • Thin Client Computing — Touchscreen Chromebooks, Zero Clients and your usual Wyse (oops I mean Dell) and HP thin client news
  • Point Of Sale RFPs — website for tracking and listing RFPs issued for POS primarily in SLED market
  • Smart City Design — we see growing interest in smart city especially in renovating downtowns for better pedestrian access longterm
  • Kiosk Industry Group – covers all the news and provides resources

Also for new for 2021 are the flip.it channels

Here are the main ones

Tony Rice Passes On – One of the great guitarists

skaggs and rice where the soul never dies

skaggs and rice where the soul never dies

Bluegrass Today obit

Tony Rice, surely the most influential guitarist and vocalist in the history of bluegrass music, died on Christmas morning. He was 69 years of age, and died swiftly without pain.

Tony changed forever the way bluegrass guitar is played, both as a lead and an accompaniment instrument. Audiences saw hints of his genius during his stint with Bluegrass Alliance in the early 1970s, but it appeared fully formed with J.D. Crowe & The New South in 1975 on their classic recording for Rounder Records, known colloquially by its catalog number, 0044.

Those of us fortunate to be alive at that time will clearly remember the first time we heard it. By the end of the banjo intro to Old Home Place, it was obvious that something new and different was going on. Rice’s guitar filled the track from top to bottom and side to side with an aggressive rhythm style that brought together the power of Jimmy Martin and Del McCoury, with the dexterity and grace of Clarence White. It propelled the band forward like nothing we had heard before.

And then he started singing! His deep baritone voice crackled with soul, and transformed that Dillards song into bluegrass majesty. Over his multi-decade career, Tony Rice’s voice became a favorite in and around bluegrass, a rare treat combined with someone of such singular instrumental capacity.

He showed those skills on Old Home Place as well, laying down a blistering half-break near the end of the song that had flatpickers scratching their heads in wonder. There was more throughout the record, and on the many others released over a career that endured for 40 years, until arthritis took away his ability to play proficiently, just as a nervous system condition had robbed him of his voice a decade earlier.

Skaggs and Rice tune

3 cities in the U.S. have ended chronic homelessness: Here’s how they did it

Excerpt below. Read full article at Fast Company

Nine more have ended veteran homelessness. It’s part of a national program called Built for Zero that uses a data-based approach to help officials figure out exactly who needs what services. Now it’s accelerating its work in 50 more cities.

“By ending homelessness, we mean getting to a place where it’s rare, brief, and it gets solved correctly and quickly when it does happen,” says Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, the nonprofit that leads the Built for Zero program. “That’s a completely achievable end state, we now see.” The nonprofit, which calls this goal “functional zero,” announced today that it is accelerating its work in 50 communities.

[Image: courtesy Community Solutions]

One key to the process is data, and a visual dashboard that lets agencies track people experiencing homelessness in real time. In Abilene, with a population a little more than 120,000, for example, the city located every homeless veteran, gathered information about each individual situation, and stored this information in a “by-name list” that was continually updated. “It basically just forced us to continuously look to change improvements to our system, and how to use real-time data to improve our performance,” says John Meier, the program manager for supportive services for veteran families for the West Central Texas Regional Foundation. “We’ve always had lots of data sitting around, but haven’t had it in one place and [haven’t been] utilizing it to our advantage.” Every agency in the city began working together and meeting to discuss how to get each veteran–21 people, as of February 2018–into housing. While watching the data, they could test interventions like working with local landlords and the public housing agency to prioritize people on the list. The average amount of time to house a veteran shrank from more than 40 days to 26. By November 2018, 10 months after joining the Built for Zero program, Abilene had reached the goal of “functional zero” for veteran homelessness. (It made the announcement in February in part because it was waiting for federal confirmation, which was delayed by the government shutdown.)

Neil Young Archives

NYA contains the complete archives of Neil Young. The site is designed for a chronological exploration of artist output including music, books, films, & videos. Music is streamed in high-res with Xstream by NYA. A living document, NYA is always being updated with new information, content and news.

Source: www.neilyoungarchives.com