The fastest, most-accurate fast-food drive-throughs, and more!

Washington Post

31-03-2025

How much time — and gasoline — do we waste in drive-through lanes at fast-food chains? 'The number of cars in line during the peak periods seems staggering,' reader Robert Campbell writes from Cumming, Georgia, midway between Atlanta and Appalachia.
Stellar question, Robert. And it's perhaps no coincidence that it comes from Chick-fil-A country.
Before the pandemic, two-thirds of fast-food sales came through the drive-through window, according to Revenue Management Solutions, the food-data aficionados whose analyses help chains price their cheeseburgers. That figure soared to 83 percent as lockdowns hit, and recently has settled back down to 63 percent. As prices soar and delivery proliferates, drive-through traffic continues to fall; by January it was down more than a quarter from its pre-pandemic level.
That big-picture analysis doesn't tell us much about drive-through conditions on the ground. So we turned to the fine folks at Intouch Insight, whose data allows us to dive surprisingly deep on specific restaurants.
For almost a quarter century, the firm and its predecessors have dispatched secret shoppers to top fast-food outlets throughout the United States. The shopper squad visits outlets from each of 10 chains at least 160 times, focusing on the lunch and dinner hours.
The shoppers collect data on just about everything, from how many cars were in line and how long they waited to place an order to the temperature of their food and whether or not the clerk said 'please' and made eye contact.
For the 10 major chains in their public sample, it took 5.5 minutes for the average car to get food in 2024. That's the best drive-through performance since 2020, when the novel coronavirus pushed wary Americans mask-first into the low-contact drive-through lifestyle.
(In case you're wondering, a new analysis from the same outfit found AI ordering systems sped up total waits by 11.5 seconds — though that may be due to speaker quality. AI-enabled locations tend to have better speakers, and Intouch Insight's 2024 report showed a clear, understandable speaker sped up service time by 28 seconds.)
To be sure, some foods are faster than others. Taco Bell took the speed crown for the second straight year, Baja Blasting us through in just 4.3 minutes. Chick-fil-A customers waited almost twice as long — eight minutes in total.
In fact, long wait times at Chick-fil-A are the only constant in a fluctuating dataset. On average since 2016, Chick-fil-A and McDonald's take the longest, while Dunkin' and KFC have the shortest waits.
Much of that has to do with popularity. Chick-fil-A had an average of five vehicles waiting to holler at the speaker (or tablet-wielding employee) in a given lane at a given time over the past five years, almost double second-place McDonalds.
If you adjust for the number of cars in line, Chick-fil-A moves fastest — which is perhaps not surprising given their Moneyball-like approach to chicken distribution, as chronicled in Heather Haddon's beautiful Wall Street Journal report on the chicken chain's big-league-sports-style film breakdowns. Apparently, they dispatch elite, drone-equipped analytics squads to speed up individual restaurants.
The Intouch Insight shoppers also measure how much of their order each chain got right. The Georgia-based chicken slingers consistently come in near the top on that one as well, with 92 percent accuracy since 2019. Burger King and McDonalds are next, with 88 percent, while KFC has struggled at 81 percent.
We couldn't find direct geographic measurements of drive-through data, despite our best efforts. But a quick analysis of Google search data for food-related drive-through terms shows Arizona must be the nation's drive-through capital.
Deep in the charts of our 'where have all the programmers gone' column, our irreplaceable editor, Lori Montgomery, spotted a trend we'd overlooked: Over the past two years, network and systems administrators had been hammered just as hard as computer programmers.
After decades and decades of steady employment, the once mighty sysadmin has struck out.
What happened?! We didn't know, so we asked the smartest people we know — our readers.
As the answers rolled in, some mentioned AI, but most focused on how a new generation of subscription software tools has made the job more efficient — and more remote. And that set the stage for outsourcing.
'The ability to perform these roles remotely sometimes causes these roles to be handed over to contractors who, being more efficient, results in fewer people in those roles,' reader and veteran IT pro Roger Blanton told us.
Then we called Brian Zielinski. As you may remember, Zielinski's firm, ShapeConnect, matches companies with vendors who can help outsource or automate certain jobs. He said business grew by 50 percent last year.
As a reserve officer in the Army Signal Corps, Zielinski cobbled together entire networks on the fly in Afghanistan, giving him a deep appreciation for the nuts and bolts of the sysadmin job — and a deep appreciation of how much it has changed.
As cloud infrastructure reduces the need for on-site employees, he said, more companies are looking to outside IT partners. And as those outside firms get bigger and more efficient, their services are getting more attractive.
Zielinski put us in touch with Enzo Scafidi, a top executive at one of those contractors, Access One Inc., in Chicago. Scafidi confirmed our suspicions.
'There is definitely a boom going on,' Scafidi said. It happened, with profoundest apologies to Ernest Hemingway, in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
First, the gradual bit. As recently as a decade ago, many system administrators had physical, hands-on jobs. They wrangled servers, ran cable and put out fires — usually, but not always, metaphorically. If they did their job well, everything ran smoothly until it didn't, making their lives look a bit like trench warfare: 'months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.'
As cloud computing ate the world, though, much of system administrators' local work shifted to distant servers. Where a company once would have run all email through Microsoft Exchange Server in a rack down the hall, it now gets it from the same sort of Microsoft subscription it may use for OneDrive storage, Teams chats or Excel spreadsheets. The same cycle happened to its financial software, its customer management — almost everything.
'I've managed environments that had dozens of servers. One server per core software,' Scafidi told us. 'And now all those things are in the cloud.'
The pandemic only accelerated the transition. With more remote workers, companies needed less on-site tech — and everybody got much more comfortable with online-only, remote solutions.
That brings us to the sudden bit. Once a company moves a critical mass of operations to the cloud, it eventually realizes that it only needs an expert during the moments of terror. It's no longer worth paying them for all those months of boredom.
So, they call someone like Scafidi. Thanks to the wonders of the internet (and a nationwide web of contractors), his firm's 'managed IT services' crew — about 80 folks, including 40 on the help desk — can juggle the moments of terror for thousands of clients. The company's large staff also means it can hire specialists for a wide range of increasingly complex services.
'The need to hire somebody on staff becomes less and less,' Scafidi told us. 'You can get away with an entry-level employee or jack-of-all trades, and outsource to a higher level … that keeps a lot of expense off the books.'
And, as Rockville, Maryland, reader and longtime IT honcho Steve Beavers points out, that frees up the IT employees as well. They no longer focus on 'monotonous maintenance' that marks so much of systems administration. They might even adopt a different job description, such as data analyst or cybersecurity expert — which would of course show up as a decrease in sysadmin jobs.
Why did the collapse not occur until 2022 or 2023? We're not sure. The foundation had been eroding for years. But Scafidi and Zielinski both pointed to the aftermath of the pandemic. It would have taken years for companies to shed their contracts and legacy tech. Rising interest rates, falling profits and scarily sophisticated cybersecurity threats perhaps provided the final push.
Zielinski also pointed to industry consolidation. When a private equity firm or larger competitor buys you out, they'll probably swap your beloved local IT staff for a squad of national specialists.
What does it mean to be good? How does it vary by region or age? Most everyone probably thinks they are a good person, but the political vitriol suggests the opposite. We are all seen as bad, or at a minimum deeply flawed, by someone. — Ruth Fundyga, in Plymouth, Massachusetts
Another stellar question! Polling might provide an answer, but how would we design the question? Would we ask Americans to rank different signifiers of goodness and compare the results?
We might need to subcontract this question out to the Department of Philosophy. But if you have suggestions on signifiers of goodness or any other ideas, let us know!
Hi there! The Department of Data's query-a-thon continues apace! What are you curious about? Are brick-and-mortar maternity stores extinct? Who has the longest commutes? Who's most likely to have known a least one person who died by suicide? Just ask!
If your question appears in a column, we'll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we'll mail one to Robert Campbell, one to Roger Blanton, one to Steve Beavers, one to Ruth Fundyga and a few more to the anonymous IT pros who helped us crack the case. We also owe one to Sherwood's Hyunsoo Rim, whose reporting pointed us toward drive-through data.