• Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    11 months ago

    As a non American: What are these people doing? Only time I’ve seen fast food personal outside around here is to empty the bins and pick up trash from the parking lot. Otherwise they are inside.

      • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        WTF, really? People around here order using a touchscreen, same as the kiosks inside. If you want you can press a button and talk to someone inside to ask a question. But the UI on the kiosks is pretty good, ordering is easy and it includes all the info you could ever want. I’ve never had a reason to press the assistance button, but I like it’s there.

        Sending actual people to stand in the rain for such a simple task seems very weird to me.

        • Neuromancer@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          Volume. Cfa are extremely busy. It’d hard to grasp how much chicken they sell.

          The order takes typically walk the line to take all the orders that way they just pull to the window to get their order.

          Some states asked cfa to help with Covid vaccine coordination since they are experts at handling large crowds.

    • WashedOver@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      The early days of drive in was waiting in your car in the parking lot and wait for a server to come out to you to take your order. Then they return to your car with the food for you to eat in your car in the parking lot. They often had trays that hooked onto your window or trays that would sit in your lap to eat from. This food was diner style food and wasn’t quick to make like fast food today is.

      These styles of restaurants fell out of style when cheap and quick fast food came along. This combined with Americans are usually only interested in the latest things or styles, many of these old style restaurants went under and disappeared into history. The Founder movie covers some of this when the McDonald’s brothers came along.

      The ones that didn’t die like A&W adopted the eat inside model with a drive thru window for pickup abandoning the older model where their waitresses would roller skate out to your car to take your order and deliver food.

      Then there are newer chains like Sonic in the US that have this old style pull up parking and a drive thru with outside seating. This is more of a nostalgia play for consumers and it worked as it was a trip to something that wasn’t around anymore so it was new again.

      I assume this Chick Fil place is doing something similar in this photo or they are just delivering food during the pandemic to people that preordered ahead of time in the rain.