McDonald's Curbside Pickup

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Alpha8472
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McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by Alpha8472 »

McDonald's is announcing future curbside pickup. You can order on a mobile app and pickup at a designated parking spot. They claim that it could speed up drive thru times and increase capacity at drive thru lanes.

If you have an employee running out to the parking lot who is going to help with the drive thru? You will need more people to handle all of this. Will your order be cold by the time you arrive? What if people don't show up? Will the food be wasted?

This could be a big mess.

They are also announcing new ordering kiosks in most stores by 2018.
Last edited by Alpha8472 on March 4th, 2017, 12:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by Super S »

Alpha8472 wrote:McDonald's is announcing future curbside pickup. You can order on a mobile app and pickup at a designated parming spot. They claim that it could speed up drive thru times and increase capacity at drive thru lanes.

If you have an employee running out to the parking lot who is going to help with the drive thru? You will need more people to handle all of this. Will your order be cold by the time you arrive? What if people don't show up? Will the food be wasted?

This could be a big mess.

They are also announcing new ordering kiosks in most stores by 2018.
Why does a restaurant with drive-thru service also need curbside pickup?

I have yet to see any restaurant chain where this has been implemented particularly well. Nobody seems to pay attention to the curbside spaces and you end up having to go inside anyway. Applebee's was really bad for this, not even sure they still do it as I gave up on that chain years ago due to encountering terrible service at nearly every location.
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Re: McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by storewanderer »

Not to mention it is an employee safety issue for employees to be running around parking lots... after dark, especially, for a variety of reasons. Many freestanding McDonalds are not really designed to make this sort of thing work too well, either, due to lot size. There is a reason why drive throughs are set up as they are- so you can "drive through." Not park, wait for food to come to the car, back out, (watching for other vehicles and people out walking), etc...

Sounds like Sonic to me, minus the order box.
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Re: McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by Alpha8472 »

I totally agree. The purpose of a drive thru is for convenience. People don't want to go through the trouble of parking and backing out. I'd rather go inside and get the food than wait in my car for an employee to bring it out to me.

McDonald's says that all U.S. restaurants will have curbside pickup by the end of the year. That also includes the McDonald's restaurants inside of Walmart stores. Many Walmart stores are very busy and can you imagine a McDonald's employee trying to battle the crowds to get out to the parking lot to deliver food to waiting cars? What about urban locations? Will McDonald's have a designated parking space on the street or will people simply double park in places like New York City?

The mobile ordering will also work at the drive thru. I have tried mobile ordering at Taco Bell, and many times when I get to the window the menu item is either sold out or wrong. When I got to the window once, they claimed that someone else had already picked up my prepaid mobile order. I had paid online and someone else came and picked it up. They said that they only go by first name. So they simply hand a mobile order to anyone who guesses the correct first name? They told me to pay for a new order.

McDonald's also said that they are rolling out home delivery. It is already happening in some areas of Florida and they insist that it will be coast to coast. Food will be delivered by an Uber driver.
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Re: McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by BillyGr »

Sort of a throwback (after all, the original McDonald brothers ran what was a drive in with carhops before they converted to a self service system) and, as Storewanderer says similar enough to what Sonic has done for years without issues of having employees bringing food to vehicles in the lot any time of day they are open or any weather (and often on roller skates, no less).

Although it could be fairly simple, if they reserved a few spots nearest the entry (like next to handicapped parking spaces) where the employees would only have to walk out the sidewalk to a car and not have to cross traffic. Seems most locations have parking like this on one side of the building (probably not all, but most).
One would also suspect (even if they say all) they wouldn't offer it where they don't have parking (city areas like NYC - many of the locations don't even have a drive thru, though I can think of at least one with a walk thru window).
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Re: McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by storewanderer »

Most McDonalds barely have enough labor to perform basic tasks, let alone this type of thing. The time spent by the employee walking from the service area to the parking lot and back is very significant; they could have pushed 2-3 cars through the drive through in that time period.

They need to get the basics right first. Stop undercooking the fries because nobody is assigned to fryer and they are out of fries. The solution? Some employee walking by, often a manager, who wants to know why orders are not getting out, who is working drive through or front counter, pulls the fries out when they still have 30 seconds left to cook. They are cooked enough. Really? If you like they soggy I guess.

This is also not great for employees in cold climates; going in and out with frequent temperature changes is a good way for employees to get sick. Many drive throughs are covered or have a heater over the window to help keep the employees from those drastic temperature shifts. But this idea...
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Re: McDonald's Curbside Pickup

Post by cjd »

I generally don't think it's a good idea to try this kind of stuff. You generally have employees that aren't trained about it and that combined with the lack of use it probably gets results in the kind of poor service you get referenced by reply #3 above.

I have noticed some McDonald's locations use a similar curbside approach when the drive thru gets backed up. Say they're waiting on fries for your order and you're sitting at the pick up window. They'll tell you to pull into a nearby parking spot with a designated number on a sign, then they bring out your order. One location I've seen even installed another pass through window in the dining room, so that cars can pull up further and they can just come up and pass the orders through there instead of having to go outside.
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