Fast Food Roulette

I've talked a few times about playing drive thru food roulette, where you order, pay, drive away and then open the bag to see what you've received, which is frequently not what you asked for, but what you've come to expect. It seems that I'm not the only one watching.

QSR Magazine, a restaurant trade publication (QSR stands for Quick Service Retail), compiled a list of fast food restaurant accuracy ratings. How they came up with the numbers wasn't disclosed, but I would guess it's along the lines of exit polling, as opposed to driving thru thousands of drive-thru's and ordering millions of dollars worth of grease soaked food and evaluating the accuracy of each order and phoning it in to a breathlessly waiting fast food accuracy score keeper.

Anyway, the results are startling, and like your surprise food purchase, unexpected. Here are selected scores, from best to worst:

#1. Chick-fil-A 97.1%
#2. Culvers 95.2%
#6. McDonald's 94.5%
#8. Burger King 93.6%
#9. KFC 93.4%
#12. Wendy's 92.0%
#13. TacoBell 91.9%
#16. White Castle 90.8%
#21. Dairy Queen 87.4%
#24. Popeyes 84.2%

I tried to discern some meaning from this collection of numbers. We don't have Chick-fil-A in the north, but I have sampled their fare and it's good. Do they have a better system or better people than #2 Culvers? Culvers is generally more costly than most fast food, and it's made to order. Chick-fil-A seems more the traditional grab-one-from-the pile system. Do you like your food piled before it's served? Mashed potatoes excluded. I'm guessing that the Chicklets are trained better and spend a few seconds more verifying that they're grabbing the right stuff, or maybe their average store sales are lower, so they aren't as harried. People ordering fast food are notoriously impatient and frequently less than gracious, so wilting under pressure may be a problem. Culvers has more steps, as the order taker has to get the information correct so that the food is made to the correct order, so there's more opportunity for error.

McD's and the King, locked in a death struggle, like Coke and Pepsi, were two spaces apart. Statistically, one in 20 times your order will be messed up. I have not eaten at McD's and the King, combined, twenty times this year, so I expect to get a hugely screwed up order if I go to either of them soon.

KFC's number is puzzling. It's chicken in a bucket, biscuits in a bag. How do you get this wrong? Do you run down the street and get Whoppers to throw in the bucket, 'cause dang it, you're not perfect!? Or are your customers trumping up the charges because they're nervous from the Colonel's beady little eyes staring at them from the bucket, so they give bad rankings?

Wendy's and Taco Bell were wrong about 8% of the time, or about 1 in 12 trips. I have never had a wrong order from Wendy's, so I believe that there is a group of survey respondents out there trying to discredit the little girl in braids. I am not accusing the King, but he is very creepy. Just sayin'. As for Taco Bell, it's all the same crap presented in different tortillas, so who really knows whether it's right or wrong?

The final three offer answers. White Castle cannot possible get that many orders wrong, and all those people standing in line, half in the bag on Saturday nights, cannot possibly recall the next morning what they ordered or what they actually ate. I think the poor scores are an attempt to avenge the digestive problems that the diners do remember.

Dairy Queen, 87.4%. Nearly 1 in 6 orders incorrect. When they hand you your food at DQ, it's all right there, an ice cream cone or a Blizzard or whatever. Don't accept chocolate if you ordered vanilla--hint: you wanted white and they're trying to give you brown--and they will fix it, or give it to you free, so you can quit giving them bad scores. Yes, I like Dairy Queen. I don't buy actual food there, just Dairy Queen stuff.

Last on the list was Popeyes. Love that chicken from Popeyes? Except when it poisons your whole family, like it did to mine...and their corporate customer service didn't do a goddam thing.  We were violently ill for days.  "Here you go, sir, 12 pieces, spicy, with the surpise salmonella seasoning..."

I do have a few real questions. First, if you made this many errors in your job, would you not get the boot? Maybe that is how people find their way to work at these restaurants, 'cause they got canned at the nuclear power plant.

Second, if you owned the restaurant--and most of these places are owned by regular people who depend on them to make a living--wouldn't you work your ass off to make sure your people get it right all the time? Mistakes happen, but one of every 6 orders wrong is practically monkey accuracy.

Finally, the vaunted systems of the companies that franchise these brands might need a little tinkering, wouldn't you say?

Imagine how the sign would look: McDonalds--"millions and millions served the wrong stuff"