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Decisions, decisions!

Which way will I go to redeem the free Chick Fil-A sandwich courtesy of the Hurricanes winning another game at home?

The two nearest choices from the house are Knightdale which is decidedly closer but the queue and the bird are usually abominable or the store on Capital Blvd in front of Sam’s which is much farther away but the experience is usually much better.

Seeing as I’d like to be back before bedtime, I decide to take my chances on Capital Blvd and it was truly an experience.

That’s putting it mildly.

Let’s get right to it with the play-by-play!

• 2018 – Mobile order placed via the app which estimates 16 minutes travel time which turns out to be pretty accurate. Mind you, I think there was some divine intervention as it’s stoplight city along New Hope Rd but I sailed through all but the one at US 401/Louisburg Rd and the one that always catches you at Capital Blvd itself.
• 2032 – Arrive in the conga line right near the street but as there appears to be space in the outboard lane, I opt for that one and signal the order taker girl that’s where I’m headed to make way for cars coming in behind me.
• 2033 – I actually make it about halfway to the order boards which are about 10m away and the single-file choke point is about 2m beyond that. Even though there are two other order takers literally next to where I stop, it’s the original girl who comes all the way from the back of the queue to along side and butchers the greeting. Badly. As in even worse than saying “hey” as the first word bad.
• 2034 – After making two attempts to get the order taker to fix the greeting to something more appropriate (which is one more than I usually offer to recover half that point in the grade), she proceeds to ask me if she’s done something wrong. I try to kindly suggest (for now the *THIRD* time!) that an appropriately respectful greeting is a very important thing and that I’d welcome it if she were to pick one and use it. That’s when she completely gives up in a huff with noticeable attitude and eye-rolling and sends the boy round.
• 2035 – Annnnnd…the boy is not appreciably better in the greeting department. He gets a second chance and also biffs it which means this is the first time this category gets a complete zero after I’ve given up hope either of them would get the clue.
• 2036 – The queue is moving extremely fast even with one vehicle in the inboard lane apparently feeling they’re so special that they don’t feel they have to observe the “two lanes alternate” custom at the choke point.
• 2037 – Arrived at the window/door on the other side of the restaurant. There is a special cut-out in the kerb to the right (see pictures below) and across from the window/door that allows escaping the queue’s waiting area ahead of the drive through overflow queues along the north side of the car park which this location uses pretty aggressively to keep the conga line going.
• 2038 – The kid manning the door wants my name again and then proceeds to not listen when it is spoken clearly and tries to have me move forward ahead of the door. The problem is that there’s a SUV in front of me and the only space available would involve me running over his manager and potentially crashing through the rear lift gate of that SUV which I’m pretty sure would make the manager and driver very cross with me. And then it gets truly surreal after this very quickly…
• 2038 – The manager who actually has my order in hand and has identified that I’m the vehicle he needs to hand that order off to refuses to walk the 2m from where he’s standing to the door where I’m actually sitting and he could hand me the order, I escape, and he can proceed with delivering to another car. I try several times to wave him my direction but he instead chooses to walk 5m *NORTH* of his original position forcing me to that escape route (which I was already planning on using) but I end up unwillingly having to block that exit until he finally hands off the food and then runs away with some sort of mumbled blessing that was seemed about 10m away from actual sincerity.
• 2039 – Using the escape route, I’m back at Capital Blvd and depart.

Here’s a picture of this location’s conga line that’s about 1.5 car widths wide…on the far right, you can barely see where the escape route to the right heads toward the strip mall building and allows an easy way out to either the Millbrook exit or Capital Blvd exit. This is the quickest way out of that car park once you have food in hand.

The Kia in the picture below is sitting pretty much where I was when I made it to the delivery door at 2037 hours. The escape route to the right is roughly level with this point of the building and the manager was standing where the yellow pole is positioned.

The SUV ahead of me was about half a meter in front of the line in the tarmac which made moving forward to be right up their six at best pointless and make getting to the escape route much harder in a Traverse whose turning radius isn’t the greatest!

If you can imagine a point about 3m following the line at the lower-left corner of the picture which would be at the left edge of the escape route and follow that back to the yellow pole…that was the path the manager walked across the lanes of traffic rather than come straightaway to where I was sitting which was much closer and certainly a lot safer for both him and me!

Seven very bizarre minutes from arrival to departure…it’s a very fast time through the drive through conga line that is much faster than is usual but the complete lack of social graces on either end of the encounter by people who usually do much better really left a bitter impression of the whole visit.

So it’s time to tally up the score…

• Initial greeting: complete and utter disaster that was much worse than the recent “no greeting” even allowing for the fact that neither of the order takers used the word “hey” (which I truly hate!) and each of them were given multiple chances to fix this. This is a *SHOCKING* betrayal of the brand and knowing Mr S Truett Cathy as I did when we attended the same church so many years ago, I can only imagine his reaction would have been best described as “horrified”. I know my reaction was and that likely coloured my perceptions of how the rest of the visit went. A very big goose egg that the players involved are lucky that I’m not actually giving negative points. It was truly that bad.
• Order correctness: spot on for the full point.
• Waffle fries: they were hot but they had that kind-of mealy texture that betrays the fact they were not cooked completely. I understand wanting to run the queue quickly but it doesn’t serve anyone’s interest to short-change the quality. If I wanted half-cooked crap fries, I’d go to Wendy’s (EWWWWWW!) or Burger King. Got to knock a quarter point off for this transgression.
• Sandwich: full marks for the sandwich, nice size and great coating.

Capital Blvd gets 2.75 out of four points for tonight’s circus and truth be told, it was quite the effort to not knock that score down even further.

No amount of speeding up time in the queue is worth sacrificing quality and actual positive human interactions which generally set Chick Fil-A well above their competitors.

Any score south of three is a #ChickFailA and this was one was a doozy of a #ChickFailA from an ordinarily solid operation.

And the truly sad thought?

Tonight’s epic failure likely still had me getting home quicker than the much closer store at Knightdale which is known for it’s epic glacial drive-through queue that inspired these Chick Fil-Audit posts in the first instance with a 37 minute wait in their conga line.