Certain customer behaviors drive Chick-fil-A employees up the wall.
What frustrates them the most?
Mispronouncing sauces?
Being rude at the drive-thru?
Keep watching to find out what orders Chick-fil-A employees hate the most.
Fast-food drive-thru etiquette: It's a thing.
And there are do's and don'ts to drive-thru ordering.
As you can imagine, several behaviors make the employees at the drive-thru of your favorite
eateries unhappy.
For instance, ordering items from other restaurants and blaming the window worker for the wrong
order.
Then there’s changing your order at the window, not having payment ready, and, of
course, talking on your cell phone and giving the "just a minute" gesture.
Why do these behaviors frustrate fast-food workers so much?
Well, to the diligent attendant waiting while you ask every person in the car what they
want, you’re just one of about 16 million people ordering at a drive-thru window that
day in America.
Six billion orders are completed by drive-thru in this country each year.
And Chick-fil-A sports the longest drive-thru lines in the nation.
So, yeah, the pet peeves of these fast-food warriors should be of concern to you.
With that in mind, what drives Chick-fil-A employees nuts?
One thing they get a good eye roll over is customers' redundant ordering.
According to Chick-fil-A employees, things like asking for fries with a kids meal, which
inherently includes fries, can drive them a little bonkers.
One comment by an employee directed toward the dedicated fans of the third-most-popular
fast-food chain in America has a good point.
They explain that there’s no need to say things like sweet and spicy sriracha.
That's a bit like asking for wet water or cold ice.
Chick-fil-A, like most fast-food establishments, is in the midst of a hiring crisis.
A full 75% of restaurant operators say that finding staff is the key challenge they are
faced with.
Seventy-eight percent say they don't have enough staff to handle their daily business.
So it would behoove all of us to pay attention to the needs of this embattled group of service
providers.
When you're smoking at the window, playing your stereo too loud, demanding fresh fries,
littering, or being a jerk at the double drive-thru, your dutiful Chick-fil-A attendant may acknowledge
you with the requisite "my pleasure."
But rest assured, it probably isn’t.
Chick-fil-A's trademark "my pleasure" response is something that apparently becomes so ingrained
that it can be hard for employees to shake when they're not donning the bright red uniform.
The phrase made it into Chick-fil-A lingo as a result of founder Truett Cathy's visit
to a Ritz Carlton.
He was delighted at being met with that particular response, as opposed to the more run-of-the-mill
"you're welcome."
Though the phrase doesn't appear in Chick-fil-A's official training manuals, it's part of a
company culture that is rooted in taking customer service above and beyond the norm.
Using it is one of the four core values that need to be remembered when serving guests.
The other three are eye contact, speaking with a friendly tone, and smiling.
"If you come and interview with me, and you don't make eye contact with me and you talk
to me over here; you're not gonna get hired."
Each of the 140,000 Chick-fil-A team members around the country is hired for that smile,
and its readiness, not their work history or resume.
When choosing new employees, hiring managers reportedly lean heavily on their assessment
of the prospective employee's personality.
And some Chick-fil-A customers also note that Chick-fil-A sets itself apart by asking for
customers' names, rather than just assigning them order numbers.
The conciliatory nature of those friendly Chick-fil-A workers translates into patience
as well.
It serves as an assurance that the eye-rolls elicited from customers' ordering faux pas
are concealed, at least to our faces.
These fast-food warriors roll with the punches, problems, and mispronunciations.
Speaking of mispronunciations, employees often have to endure all of the different ways the
adoring public butchers the pronunciation of Polynesian sauce.
Some of the more interesting interpretations of the name include things like "playground
sauce," "Himalayan sauce," "Pomeranian sauce," "poly-Asian sauce," and "the Asian joint."
One self-identified Chick-fil-A employee wrote that at their store, team members were given
shirts sporting the many monikers the Polynesian sauce had been given.
If customers' inability to pronounce sauce names correctly brings a chuckle, or at least
a light-hearted face-palm, to the fast-food workers standing in the cold in an effort
to expedite the drive-thru experience, we're happy to oblige.
Really, it's our pleasure.
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