After briefly wondering if I was going to be at ground zero of the poultry insurrection at the Sam’s Club, my next mission once I was free of their big box confines was to go for some of the Lord’s Bird at the Chick Fil-A just across the car parks near Capital Blvd.
Certainly the Carolina Hurricanes have been doing their part to encourage these trips to Chick Fil-A (probably much to Chick-Fil-A’s chagrin) by winning excessively at home and when they do, you’ll get a free chicken sandwich if you log into their mobile app before midnight (and you’re in the ZIP codes they’ve opened up for the promotion).
Now I’m sure you’ve noticed that the queues round Chick Fil-A have ranged from merely massive to “genuinely causing major traffic issues which surprisingly hasn’t led to more rear-end collisions”, especially during the pandemic when a combination of reduced staffing and increased demand for bird reached an unholy breaking point.
And it wasn’t like their queues were terribly short prior to the pandemic, either with the average wait time from ordering at the speaker to food delivery being one of the highest in the industry averaging over five minutes!
Since the pandemic started, the average time I’d find myself stuck in the queue at Chick Fil-A was rarely less than 15 minutes even when I’d turn up well away from the traditional lunch and dinner rush times.
The only time I can remember it being much less than that and also below the usual average was a run through the Chick Fil-A in Brier Creek whilst I was getting a bit of airplane therapy at the just reopened observation park at RDU.
That’s probably the best Chick Fil-A in the area in terms of efficiency (which is nice because it seems they’ve also gotten rid of the jerks with very poor and un-Chick Fil-A attitudes that worked their drive-through pre-pandemic).
I already had the order dialed into their mobile app before I got to their location and they’ve opened up a special mobile order by-pass lane that you scan the QR code and head to the window.
Three minutes from the time I turned into their car park to the time I was back out on Lumley Road heading toward RDU with some bird in the bag to watch the big birds take to the air.
Compare that to this instance where Julia got lucky and breezed through the White Oak Chick Fil-A fairly quickly (shocking!) when I made the mistake of going to the one in Knightdale closest to my house.
A word about that Knightdale location…it literally just went through the refurbishment of the building and lot and it was clear that whoever planned it didn’t have the first clue about the root cause of their service delivery problems prior to the refurbishment.
Here’s a big hint…it wasn’t the temporary tents that got replaced with a more permanent structure on the perimeter of their lot that still ends up going from two lanes to a single-lane choke point of failure. They literally did nothing to solve the problems they were already experiencing and if anything made them far worse.
So here’s the play-by-play of just how much of a god-awful purgatory the Chick Fil-A conga-line can get:
- 1828 – Mobile order placed whilst at Sheetz three miles away
- 1832 – Arrive at strip mall containing Knightdale Chick Fil-A
- 1847 – Finally make the turn into the Chick Fil-A car park after a 15 minute tailback stretching all the way round the IHOP and backed up onto US-64
- 1852 – Finally reach an order taker who seems somewhat unnecessary with a paid mobile order and an app that’s tracking me and aware of where I am in their queue
- 1855 – Alert comes through that order is ready even though I’ve not moved appreciably further and haven’t even cleared the menu board with ordering speaker. The single point of convergence is still easily 25m or so away and I’m seriously wondering if I’m going to see the kid delivering the order walk round the back of their building and hand it to me when I can’t leave immediately afterward.
- 1905 – Arrive at single-lane choke point
- 1907 – In the single-lane conga line
- 1908 – At the delivery window
- 1909 – Finally departing their car park
37 minutes from arriving in the queue until I’m finally on my way. I had thought about canceling the order but as I didn’t really have anything better to do and honestly, a morbid curiosity had set in wondering just how bad it was going to be.
Now, I’ve long been a proponent that whoever plans these fast-food drive-throughs needs to treat the footprint of the store as if it were an aircraft carrier where the most critical aspect of the operation is the catapults (or in the case of Chick Fil-A, the window where you hand out the food).
If the carrier doesn’t keep the catapults launching aircraft, then it’s essentially a sitting duck because it’s primary line of defence are the picket ships surrounding the carrier.
The Japanese Navy found that out the hard way during the Battle of Midway when they got caught a couple of times with their planes on the decks changing from bombs to torpedoes (or vice versa) and most of their flat-tops went to the bottom of the sea.
The captain of the Nimitz-class carrier USS Enterprise in “Top Gun” also understands the importance of keeping the cats feeding planes in the air:
[At the carrier, in the midst of the MiG battle, Stinger asks the status of the reinforcement planes]
Stinger: What about Wilder and Simpkin?
Officer: Both catapults are broken sir, we cannot launch any aircraft yet.
Stinger: How long?
Officer: It’ll take ten minutes.
Stinger: Bullshit ten minutes! This thing will be over in TWO minutes, get on it!
One of the most important guys on the deck is called the “shooter”…this is the person in the little blister pod between the catapults who is dialing in what type of plane is on the deck ready to be launched and hits the button to send them on their way.
In Chick Fil-A’s case, they need to position that single-queue choke point at the place where 90% of the orders can be fulfilled at the window from the time the car arrives at the shooter’s position.
That would probably alleviate at least half of the problem there…hand off food, launch car…repeat. If there’s a problem with an order, get that car out of the way so you can get the conga line moving and fix whatever their issues are out of the main catapult area.
The locations that are only allowing drive-through (White Oak, Garner, and Knightdale!) ought to take a look at what Brier Creek and Capital Blvd are doing which is providing multiple ways of getting the Lord’s Bird where only one of them is the actual drive-through.
I mentioned Brier Creek’s human order taker bypass QR lane and Capital Blvd when it’s at full staffing will give you four options to play with:
- Drive-through (still does the two lanes to one thing though they have a big overflow area to handle order problems)
- Mobile takeaway inside (think Door Dash, et al)
- Curbside (my personal favourite when it’s offered…yay!)
- Inside dining
Sadly, curbside was not on offer the previous time I was at the Capital Blvd location and I had to do the drive-through. Honestly, it wasn’t terribly bad in terms of wait time (just after lunch as well, must have gotten lucky) but the kid delivering the meal actually walked about a quarter of the way round his building with my order.
It’s probably for the best they’d screwed up the lemonade and put ice in it because I’d have been stuck there for a couple of minutes until I could move forward enough to finally escape the conga line.
I have had instances where other Chick Fil-A’s have made the delivery even though I’d not moved very much and I was pretty much done eating it by the time I could escape the queue.
This latest order was curbside at the Capital Blvd location where I did the mobile order from the Sam’s Club car park, then drove for a minute to pick a curbside spot whose number you put into their app and about four minutes later the nice lady came round with bag and lemonade in hand.
She was even kind enough to laugh at my Prisoner joke about the particular spot I found myself parked:
YouTube has been serving me up a lot of cop watch and First Amendment audit videos of late. These are those videos were guys with cameras will go somewhere and stand on the public sidewalk/easement/right-of-way and exercise their First Amendment rights to video anything their eye can see in a publicly-accessible space. They also like to do videos in post offices and other government buildings where they are often confronted by security and law enforcement in encounters that range from polite and respectful to full-on F-bomb fests (for the record, I don’t really care for the latter ones so much…it’s one thing to make a point and stand your ground but there’s no need to be vulgar about it).
I’m thinking this might well be my variation on an audit-style blog entry…maybe I ought to invest in a dash cam and have fun auditing Chick Fil-A wait times.
After all, the Hurricanes are doing a bang-up job of subsidising my visits for the Lord’s Bird!
So what do you think?
Chick Fil-Audits. Just like Bill Maher’s “New Rules” but for the Lord’s Bird. 😉