New Research Reveals Which Fast Food Chain Has the Fastest Drive-Thru and Which Has the Slowest

There are a couple of essential components to a successful drive-thru run. For starters, when you peer into that warm paper bag, you want to see everything that you ordered. Next, you hope that you’re not waiting in line long enough to watch all the good stuff on your For You page.

The industry insiders at QSR Magazine have released the annual Drive-Thru Study, sharing the lowdown on which fast food chains have the fastest drive-thru lines, which ones prepare the most accurate orders, and which are the friendliest while they’re doing both of those things. 

To conduct this study, QSR made 1,491 drive-thru runs in June and July of this year, spreading them out between the breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours at fast food restaurants throughout the United States. On average, they visited 10 different chains and placed orders at around 165 restaurants representing each chain. 

According to QSR’s data, Taco Bell has the fastest drive-thru for the third straight year. On average, it took customers 278.84 seconds to receive their orders, almost half a minute faster than Carl’s Jr (303.74 seconds), the next-speediest drive-thru. The top five included KFC (303.95 seconds), Arby’s (319.64), and Dunkin’ (321.10). The slowest drive-thru was at Chick-fil-A, at over seven minutes per order (436.09) — but that doesn’t tell the whole story. 

QSR also determined that Chick-fil-A had the busiest drive-thru lines, with an average of 3.41 cars waiting for their orders. That was followed by McDonald’s (2.01 cars), Wendy’s (1.50), Taco Bell (0.96), Burger King (0.92), and Dunkin’ (0.78). 

Chick-fil-A also topped the customer service chart, and its associates were rated as 91% friendly. (Interestingly, 9% were rated “neutral” when dealing with customers, and 0% were categorized as “not friendly” — the only chain to have a 0% in that metric.) The next-friendliest were Hardee’s and Taco Bell, which were both rated 79% friendly, followed by Arby’s and Carl’s Jr, which both had a 76% friendly rating. 

And finally, Chick-fil-A was the most accurate drive-thru, with overall orders clocking in as 92% accurate. That was followed by Burger King (90%), McDonald’s (88%), Wendy’s (87%), and KFC (87%). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accuracy of orders increased by 7% when the restaurant had an Order Confirmation Board where the customer could both see and confirm their order to the restaurant’s team members. Order accuracy also improved by between 11% and 18% when the speaker was both loud enough and clear enough to hear what the restaurant staffer was saying. 

“While speed remains important, it may not be the ultimate king anymore,”  Phil Crawford, the chief technology officer at Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s parent company, CKE Restaurants, told QSR. “With the introduction of new ordering technologies and menu items, speed might be compromised in favor of other aspects such as order accuracy or menu complexity. Still, reducing wait times continues to be a major focus for quick-service restaurants.”

Either way, we’ll be using a stopwatch on our next drive-thru run. Actually … who are we kidding, we’ll be scrolling through the FYP until someone asks us to pull to the next window.