I’m on the road a lot and pretty often I get hungry while driving. It’s pretty hard not to when one is taking 5-6 hour drives or when one is rushing from one appointment to the next with little time between them. So occasionally I stop (or drive through) a fast food restaurant to pick up a snack.
Now I know all the bad things about the food. The quality is often not so good and the calorie counts are high and blah blah blah. But they are cheap (relatively) filling and sometimes you just need to get some food in your system. My biggest problem with them lately is the service though.
Not that it is slow but that they get the orders wrong. I’ve had triple Whoppers (yeah I know) come with only two meat patties. Or missing ketchup. Or added stuff that I asked to be left off. Or order hot chocolate and get hot coffee. Some of the errors, like the coffee, mean that the order is inedible for me.
Yesterday I ordered a bacon burger that turned out to be completely someone else’s order. No bacon and a bunch of stuff on it that I don’t like. Fortunately I had decided to eat in rather than drive through. It seems like fairly often after driving through and getting on down the road and finding out that the order is wrong. Far too late to turn back and get it corrected. There seems like little one can do about this.
Yesterday’s problem was resolved as they always are when you bring things back and show them the problem. So it is an annoyance when you eat in but it is still a big deal when you drive through.
Oh and did I mention that the deciding factor between eating in and driving through was that they had a sign that said “free wi-fi inside” in the window? There was wi-fi but my laptop could not connect to it for reasons that are lost to me. Somehow I didn’t think that the people behind the counter would be able to help me. And by that time I had pretty much decided that I had lost enough time at this one location to stay. Had the staff gotten my order right and given me a bit more confidence I might have tried to get the problem fixed. That would have meant better satisfaction for the next customer and been a good thing for the store. But somehow fixing their problems had fallen to a low priority for me.
I’m not sure what the answer is for these places with regards to getting orders right. They have to hire people smart enough to do the job but not so smart that they get too bored to do the job right. A fine line. And few of the employees seem to feel invested in the company or store enough to take real pride in their work. It’s tough. But I sure do wish they could get my orders right. Is that really too much to ask?