If, by magic, you could wave a wand and drop quick-service speed time down to 30 seconds (from order to fulfillment), I’d imagine most QSR operators would willingly take the offer. In the traditional fast food model, this average precision in speed across all dayparts is nearly unheard of.
But 30 seconds is all of the time that Pal’s Sudden Service, with 26 locations in northeast Tennessee and Virginia, needs to fulfill an order: 18 seconds at the drive-up window, and 12 at the second window for order handoff. Pal’s amazingly does this manually without sacrificing accuracy. The company’s reported mistake rate is just 1 in every 3,600 orders.
Comparing employee prowess to the “smooth and fluid” yet well-trained movements of professional athletes, CEO Thomas Crosby recognized an opportunity to create a people-centric program that focuses on excellence and growth potential, as told to HBR. The results have been astounding: Front-line employees’ turnover is also one-third of the national average and only seven managers have left voluntarily in the company’s 33-year history.
Operational rigor in the form of constant checks keep this well-oiled people machine running. New employees get 120 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own and are constantly retrained. “Every day on every shift in every restaurant, a computer randomly generates the names of two to four employees to be re-certified in one of their jobs—pop quizzes, if you will. They take a quick test, see whether they pass, and if they fail, get retrained for that job before they can do it again,” HBR reports.
How would a brand like Pal’s be able to iterate on this already-speedy service model yielding 30 second average times? On that topic, I immediately think back earlier this month to a similar discussion at this year’s ICR Conference, where Noah laid out our thesis on the new essential restaurant metric:
“We live in a world where the rules have changed. There’s a new brand of consumer that can stream a song at the touch of a button, download a movie at the touch of a button, hail a car at the touch of a button. The restaurants that succeed will be those that meet the needs of this new brand of on-demand consumer. Drive-thru has gone through incremental improvements, but no major changes over the last 53 years. No matter how many seconds you can shave off of a drive-thru time, it’s never as fast as on-demand: 0 seconds. So the new metric of success is not about how well a restaurant masters the drive-thru but how well they master digital ordering.“
One can imagine a scenario where instead of putting all of the onus on lightning-fast order keying, meals are fired into the POS and picked up in only the matter of seconds it takes to handoff an order in designated parking spots. Orders can be processed in parallel so those who’ve ordered ahead are not stuck behind those still deciding on an order.
And though it may seem difficult to iterate on a 0.02% mistake rate, all errors from the order placement side of the house disappear as pre-paid orders hit the POS exactly as they were entered by the customer.
Perhaps the best part about digital ordering systems is that they serve as an equalizer for all formats with the ability to be tweaked to solve unique challenges associated with each service model. We can expect to see more drive-thru heavy concepts jumping in to reap the benefits this year.
