Restaurant Designs of the Future

[Alpha8472]

Chick-fil-a is coming out with a drive-thru/walk up restaurant with no dining room. Taco Bell is also coming out with a design with no dining room. Captain D's is doing a double drive-thru.

The size of the restaurants are also shrinking.

https://www.nrn.com/operations/9-protot ... nts-future

[ClownLoach]

Chick-fil-a is coming out with a drive-thru/walk up restaurant with no dining room. Taco Bell is also coming out with a design with no dining room. Captain D's is doing a double drive-thru.

The size of the restaurants are also shrinking.

https://www.nrn.com/operations/9-protot ... nts-future

This is a really misleading article. Opening one random Chick-fil-A in an unusual location isn't a prototype. They're opening full size locations with dine in built from scratch daily right now.

Construction costs are skyrocketing and restaurant space is freely available. Reuse, not rebuilding into tiny little dining room free boxes, is the trend. Most of these are leftovers that were dead on arrival now that the pandemic is over, and they'll be closed and forgotten about in just a couple of years.

[wnetmacman]

Chick-fil-a is coming out with a drive-thru/walk up restaurant with no dining room. Taco Bell is also coming out with a design with no dining room. Captain D's is doing a double drive-thru.

The size of the restaurants are also shrinking.

https://www.nrn.com/operations/9-protot ... nts-future

A Chick-Fil-A with no dining room is not unusual; after all, the Mall model perfected that. There has also been a Checkers-style CFA in West Monroe, LA since the late 90s; there is a full size restaurant next door.

[ClownLoach]

Chick-fil-a is coming out with a drive-thru/walk up restaurant with no dining room. Taco Bell is also coming out with a design with no dining room. Captain D's is doing a double drive-thru.

The size of the restaurants are also shrinking.

https://www.nrn.com/operations/9-protot ... nts-future

A Chick-Fil-A with no dining room is not unusual; after all, the Mall model perfected that. There has also been a Checkers-style CFA in West Monroe, LA since the late 90s; there is a full size restaurant next door.

The implications of these clickbait articles are that everything is going to move to these kiosk type operations like Sonic without indoor dining, but it could not be further from the truth.

All that is happening is that these chains are exploring new building shapes and designs that allow them to select locations where their old cookie-cutter prototypes would not fit.

Chick-fil-a for example opened a tiny kiosk location as described in the article almost 5 years ago in San Juan Capistrano. They didn't do it for trends, COVID hadn't happened yet, they did it because there was no site on "fast food row" that they could fit in and they wanted to move in and compete so they built a skinny little box with order and take out windows and outdoor picnic tables instead of a dining room. And an identical location is presented as a new concept in this article.

The idea that chains with tens of thousands of units worldwide are going to suddenly flush all their buildings and replace them when construction costs are at an all time high is a complete farce. You are not going to see Taco Bell tear down all the dining rooms and build the kiosk shown here, nor the laughable 4 lane elevated 2 story prototype with chutes that drop the food to each lane. None of these will ever be used to replace anything existing. They're just experimental options that might be used to build a restaurant where one doesn't currently fit, not to replace any existing location of these chains.

I'm sorry but I'm just tired of reading these clickbait articles that are a dime a dozen like "Business Insider" and such that regurgitate old press releases and pretend that they're exciting news of magical and life changing redesigns coming to your local Wendy's a week from next Tuesday or something like that. The average million mile flyer won't ever see a single one of these dumb prototypes, and neither will any of us on this website.

[storewanderer]

There is a Chickfila in Fairfield, CA with a bank tube like thing that transports food to outer drive through lanes (maybe only one lane). It is neat. They have a soda machine out in the little booth in the outer lane so those don't get transported. The booth is fairly spacious- it can easily fit 2 employees, maybe 3. Not sure how they handle milkshakes or ice Dream products. So that wouldn't be a new concept either. Rare, yes.