616
Carbrain culture is sitting in your car for 20 minutes instead of getting out and just walking into the restaurant.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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This is probably during COVID when the inside was off limits.
Plenty of people still use the drive through, but the complete lack of anyone in the carpark is sus.
I work fast food. When shorthanded, which is all the time, if the line is wrapped around the building but the customers are at least not coming inside, service can be at least normal slow instead of slower than fuck. More customers can be served per hour via drive through than front counter with any level of staffing. When people start coming inside, suddenly drive through employees are getting stuck standing in front of registers and overall service speeds go from just slow to slower than fuck.
Nearly every fast food place in the UK has gone to self serve machines because of that, and taken away the ability to even take orders at the registers.
Although in practice it now means a bunch of staff helping old people use the self serve, rather than just taking the orders.
I very rarely even go there. The food isn't even fast. It seems mostly cooked to order because it's cheaper to waste my time than it is to give away a handful of old burgers at the end of the day.
I'm in New Jersey, and mobile orders are big now. On the rare occasion we hit Wendy's (I can smell it from my front door, it's hard), we do the mobile order. I order, get in the car, park, walk in, grab it, walk out. I couldn't imagine ordering upon arrival at this point.
Former "partner"(ugh) circa 2015 here
Back when I walked for the bux, 5 years before covid, this was my daily drive thru experience. My store averaged about 6 grand (thats about 700 customers) on DT alone during our morning rush, 6 hours straight of underfilled cars starting their day with caffeine dessert.
This specific store could be a covid thing, but empty lobbies with cars wrapped around the building has kinda been starbie's MO for the last decade or so that they've been transitioning away from "third place" mindset to "oh fuck we're competing with McDicks mindset"
I see this kind of thing regularly at my local Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers restaurant when it hits dinner time. The cars wrap around the building and block other traffic.
Same for the DQ where I live.
This would be a believable theory if I didn't see huge lines of cars outside fast food restaurants every day before and after COVID.
"We" probably have a too European view on this. Though walking/biking also makes the parking lots emptier