What are the ethics of a fast food drive through lane?

1. You order, you wait for it to be ready.
2. If you have waited and it is not ready when you get to the window, you can leave hungry.
3. The restaurant has to not take order add ons or changes once a car gets to the window.

I think you should have waited for your order. It would have taken just as long if you were inside.

I think driving away was appropriate.
There is a target time for getting you your food in drive-thru, it is considerably less than 5 minutes. If there was space for you to leave the drive thru, there was room for the truck in front of you to pull forward.

I don’t order a lot from drive-ups, mainly coffee or the occasional item from the $$ menu but I have left if I consider it an inordinately long wait.

I know I am in trouble if the car in front of me pulls up and begins their order with “Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…...........................”. Ya know, you should have some idea as to what you want, you decided to go there. I just want a black coffee but now I have to sit here and wait, not only for your order to be made but for you to figure out what you want.

I have noticed that most will ask a larger order or time consuming on to move up so that other orders can be processed. That is how it should be.

I’ve done this and have no problem with it. If the owner or manager of the place sees this happen too much, they will improve the service. You’ve just voted with your dollars.

I have this dream that all order tickets have to be accounted for and that someone scrutinizes the drive-offs, particularly for wait time. I’m sure there’s some truth to it, but I doubt the weight I would like/imagine.

The local drive-in/up only joint (no dining room) got a new manager last year and then they started ‘gaming the system’. They would make you sit at the order speaker for minutes at a time before they would allow you to order.
That was annoying!

I’m with @Espiritus_Corvus here. You placed an order in good faith, expecting it to be completed in “normal delivery time”. Presumably the order taker accepted it in the same manner, and did not envision an abnormal delay at the delivery window.

If the driver of the truck had a special order, an especially large order, or multiple last-second add-ons and changes, then the window person should have directed him to park elsewhere to not hold up the line. That’s normal.

If you had expected to drive past the window and have the order waiting for you to scoop up without even having to fully stop, then clearly that would have been extreme impatience on your part. But that’s not the case; you expected a normal wait of maybe a minute or two, tops. You went more than five minutes (that you know of – who knows how long you waited before you started to time it because, “hey, this is taking way too long”).

So you reacted in a normal way to a broken process. The store manager needs to recognize that his process is broken and take appropriate steps to fix it. I probably would not have waited, either.

The person taking your order should have advised you that there might be a delay. It’s on them.

Not your bad. Most drive throughs I know of will ask a customer to pull up to a designated waiting area to avoid just that type of frustration.

When you placed your order, you made a contract with the restaurant. You agreed to pick up and pay for your food, and the restaurant was obliged to fill your order, meet the expected taste and quality standards, and deliver within a reasonable period of time. It’s called “fast” food, not “sit and linger” food.

You were second in line, yet you had to wait for quite a while. You didn’t act unfairly when you gave up and left. You’d already been reasonable. You did nothing wrong.

Taco Bell has solved this conundrum by making the entire drive-thru lane (from order to exit) one lane.

@Love_my_doggie If there is no consideration of any value exchanged at the order window, there is no contract.

@ibstubro aren’t all drive-thrus one lane from order to exit?

@Espiritus_Corvus Drive thrus I have been to tell you what your total bill is.

@zenvelo Drive thrus I have been to tell you what your total bill is.
Most retail establishments do the same. For example, you can go to a retail store, have the clerk ring up your order or checkout, and up until that time there is no contract. At the point where you agree with the checkout, and pay the money, there is a contract, the exchange of goods (or services) for money. You may, up until that point, decide you want to adjust the order, or cancel it altogether.

An exception to that is the traditional (not fast-food) restaurant.

The question is how long is a reasonable time to be expected to wait for your food. You had the good fortune to be able to escape the line. More often than not, this is not the case and you are stuck. As far as I’m concerned, a place offering “convenience food” voids our contract the moment the experience becomes inconvenient. The chain will survive the financial loss of a cup of coffee and a croissant.

@zenvelo So far, I think you’ve described an offer to perform. Without the exchange of valuable consideration, I don’t think you have a contract, or a promise to perform.

No, @zenvelo, many drive-thurs have enough room to exit before the transaction is complete.
Taco Bell has a single, dedicated lane you enter before you order, and leave after you reach the window.

What @elbanditoroso describes is not possible at Taco Bell.

@Espiritus_Corvus So the way you construe it, there is no contract until it is paid? I think most courts would disagree with you on that.

I would side with @Espiritus_Corvus on this @zenvelo, I don’t think they submit your order until it is paid for; not sure though.

@rojo.Not sure where you go through drive throughs, but that has not been my experience. At Jack In The Box, one gets to the pick up window, gives them cash and gets handed a bag.

@ibstubro – this was not Taco Bell – in fact it was Burger King, and there was no concrete barrier between the drive thru line and the parking lot. So I pulled out.

@zenvelo my experience is that I drive up to the speaker, place an order, pull up to the “first window” as directed, pay for my stuff then proceed to the second window where they have my stuff.

I KNOW THAT, @elbanditoroso.

Read my post for context.

@zenvelo Well, it is definitely arguable. I believe I am right to abandon negotiations when I believe the person I’m negotiating with will not perform. If I got tired of waiting for what I thought was a reasonable time and then drove off and then was arrested for what is called defrauding an inkeeper (Florida), this is how I would present my case:

I would argue that no crime was committed because there was no binding contract between myself and the inkeeper. I would submit (1) there was insufficient consideration exchanged between myself and the purveyor, e.g. nothing of value, at the time the purveyor made the offer to provide me with a croissant and a cup of coffee for a specified price, and therefore there was no obligation to perform on my part at this point in contract formulation. In other words, no mutuality of obligation had been met. (See Elements of a Contract) Under this doctrine, both parties must be bound to perform their obligations or the law will treat the agreement as if neither party is bound to perform. Under this doctrine, both parties must be bound to perform their obligations or the law will treat the agreement as if neither party is bound to perform.

I would also (2) remind the court that, although there are other forms of consideration for contracts besides the exchange of money, in order to simplify things, the custom in the U.S. is that a portion of the agreed price of performance is paid up front in order to satisfy the contract element of consideration.

I would then be prepared to submit an overwhelming amount of precedent cases that hinged upon monetary consideration over consideration of performance and other sorts of consideration.

At that point, it is up to the judge or jury. In an unbiased court, I believe I would win. In our courts, it’s a crapshoot.

If I did lose, I would petition for appeal based upon the restaurant breaking the contract element of performance, or in this case, the lack of performance on the part of the restauranteur. I would submit that the ill-defined term “Fast food” states or implies that the purveyor will perform in such a way and that he did not and therefore I deemed the contract at that point null and void. And then I left. This case will of course come down to the definition of the term “Fast Food” and it’s common implications. I would submit that five minutes was too long to wait for “Fast Food.”

At that point, it would be up to a judge or a jury.

As I’m not a mind reader or a lawyer, or a person with a lot of faith that I would get an unbiased judge or jury, I have no idea how this case would come out.

I’ve been in drive-thrus that avoid this entirely in two ways:

(1) They take the full amount at the order window and in this way commit you to the contract.
(2) They don’t take the money at the order window, but if you look down at at the lane you are traveling in you might notice that it is about 11’ wide and bordered by 4” to 6” concrete curbs rising 90 degrees from the street. They are there to assist you in accepting their offer whether they perform in a timely manner or not.

If the restaurant advertises itself as serving “fast food” waiting for 5 minutes would irk me…but this process involves underpaid unskilled humans and in the real world problems with orders and service do happen and I expect them to occur. I would have waited this one out.

I think the term “fast” food means faster than cooking for yourself but not necessarily uber fast sometimes. lol
If there are 5 cars ahead of you when you place an order, or, the dining room is full and there are only two cars in the drive through you have to be a little patient. People also ask for special orders. I do a lot.

No cheese, skip the middle bun,light on the onions, extra sauce, etc. and at my favorite drive through mexican place I order all sorts of customized items and they also fill several different types of salsa containers for me from the salsa bar in their dining room. If you’re going to be late for work or a movie go ahead and bail out if line if you can, otherwise I just chill out and wait.

@Espiritus_Corvus A promise to pay is valid consideration that makes a contract enforceable. Someone trades a promise in return for performance.

Let’s say that I hire a landscaper to clean my yard after this winter and prepare it for the springtime. I agree to pay the landscaper $500 upon completion of the work. By your reasoning, no contract exists because I didn’t pay up front. But, of course, there’s a very real contract that’s enforceable; I have to pay the man.

I didn’t exchange my promise to pay $500 for the landscaper’s promise to do my yardwork. Rather, I exchanged my promise to pay for the landscaper actually performing the work.

Before we get too entrenched in a discussion about contract law, it’s worth noting that @elbanditoroso asked about the ethics of leaving a fast food drive-up queue, not about the legality.

One question, @Coloma.

If you’re going to custom order everything, why the hell don’t you just park your ass and go _IN??_
Obviously you’re in no hurry, so what’s the advantage to holding up the drive-thru for 20 minutes?
Honestly, you are my worst nightmare. I feel super guilty asking for tarter on the side with my fish sandwich.

Sorry for the rant…I’ve had this conversation in my mind dozens of times, obviously!

I was thinking of reasons why the window transaction could have taken so long. Maybe they had a problem with their credit card reader or cash register. Just one example.

If I were in a hurry, I would have left, too. I think the customer is within their rights to cancel the transaction at any time. If I order something from mail order and it takes such a long time that I have to get the item elsewhere, I am within my rights to cancel the order, in my opinion.

If there was a problem with the order or the equipment (cash register, card reader, etc.), the worker should have asked the car to pull over in the lot and then bring the food out to them. That’s happened to me, and there’s a spot in our local McD’s for cars waiting for their order.

Some lines have concrete barriers so you can’t leave.

In my opinion, when you gotta go, you gotta go. If you are going to be late for work and the service is way too slow, nobody should feel you should be forced to remain.

The places I go tend to have a clock. When I dine in, I see things start flashing, sometimes with audible alarms, if it hits three minutes. Some even have designated spaces for those with “problem orders” to pull over and let the rest of the line go about their business.

In short, there’s no reason for you to wait that long in a drive-thru.

@ibstubro Some really only do have one lane though. If there is someone behind you, you’re stuck unless you shove someone out of the way; a feat not all vehicles have the power and traction to do effectively.

Jesus effing God, @jerv. Would you LOOK at my post @elbanditoroso referred to! There are PHOTO LINKS of single and multi-lane drive thrus!!

@ibstubro I tend not to click photo links on my phone (they eat my data plan), but I admit that I misread the tiny letters. I really should stop posting before my morning coffee hits :p

This woman views it as unethical to have the drive through lane filled up when she wants a McRib.

That’s a pretty hilarious video, @zenvelo – as long as people notice the disclaimer underneath it. And I would definitely steer clear of that McDonalds on Dorset.