If you’d asked me yesterday about how exciting it’d be dropping Alex off for his shift at Chick Fil-A, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have anticipated the idiocy that awaited me on the other side of the building.
A bit of context here: the postage stamp of a car park that the restaurant sits upon is barely bigger than the restaurant itself and one can dream when they finally knock over the building and rebuild it in the next couple of years that they expand the lot to dramatically improve the traffic flow.
If Knightdale is anything to go by, one can dare to dream that might actually happen. They moved the drive-through queues to the perimeter of the lot but kept the same choke-point that was the reason the queue occasionally backed up all the way back to New Bern Av showing that their engineers had learnt…absolutely nothing!
The new store in front of the Mos Eisley Wal-Mart (now with 15% more scum and villainy!) was at least smart enough to keep two lanes (one regular drive-through and my preferred mobile drive-through which is often orders of magnitude faster) on a lot that’s even smaller than the one Alex’s store sits upon.
Perhaps there is hope for them after all. 🙂
At Alex’s Chick Fil-A, there are spaces to park to your right as you enter the pattern, more in the back and a set of spaces in front of the place near the kiddie playground which would have been rather useful as you’ll see soon enough.
There is another set of spaces on the side of the building closest to Target but those have been re-purposed in a desperate attempt to make the traffic situation less heinous, particularly at the busy intervals.
When you come round the back of the building to the side facing Target, you’ll be presented with three lanes guarded by traffic bollards in a line. The closest one to the building is the actual drive-through lane, the middle one is the lane you take to complete the lap round the building to join the drive-through queue which is two lanes that collapse down to the one along the side of the building.
The outermost lane that replaced the parking spaces on that side of the building is the one intended for traffic not joining the drive-through queues to exit the car park and Chick Fil-A property and presumably carry on with their life.
It’s not particularly surprising to encounter another vehicle in that exit lane.
What was rather unexpected was seeing a huge Dodge RAM pickup dual-cab truck sitting there and making no effort to go the 4m it would take for them to make their escape..
You’d have thought they’d have taken the hint with three short blasts on the horn with ten seconds between them that they might want to get moving so that people wishing to exit could do so.
The lack of response and even less movement of that truck out of the way was more than a little disappointing.
So now I’m having to reverse down the lane to get to the drive-through lap completion lane (with a couple of cars approaching that lane to join the queue likely wondering what in the hell I was doing!) so that I can make my escape that way through a bit of jiggery-pokery that’s unnecessary if I could just use the lane intended for the exit.
As I’m approaching the port side of the truck trying to ascertain if the pilot is merely engrossed by their phone or suffering from hypoxia but can’t tell due to the likely illegally dark tint that apparently wasn’t detected at their last state inspection, I finally see the reason why they were blocking the exit lane in the form of two kids who couldn’t have been more than ten years old blithely running across the two inner lanes to get to the back door of that truck and climb in.
It was hard not to notice them as I had to dump the brakes to avoid hitting these two children that did not even bother looking to their right much less the preferred both directions before stepping into the street and crossing.
Apparently they’re of the mind that the Lugnut Rule does not apply to them (i.e. if the object has more and/or larger lugnuts than you, you might want to let it have the right-of-way).
So essentially they sent young children who aren’t trained in the basic situational awareness and safety techniques to collect their order and couldn’t be bothered to park up in the spaces in the front of the building literally only about 5-10m north of where they were sitting.
Yes, I get it that escaping the car park from those spaces isn’t exactly the easiest or most convenient option but it’s not impossible to find a gap in the incoming traffic and make your way out.
But it’s at least the option that would have been decidedly safer for your children to cross less lanes of traffic that aren’t quite as busy and also have the benefit of not showing to the world what a selfish bellend of a person you are! 🙁
