Chick-fil-A Opens Atlanta-Area Drive-Thru-Only Store With No Pre-Sell Or Menu Displays
August 21, 2024 by Dave Haynes
It’s a bit premature to see a newly-opened Chick-fil-A drive-thru restaurant as a worrying trend, but a new two-story, four-lane operation that’s opened in the general orbit of Atlanta is certainly noteworthy for the near or total absence of the promo and drive-thru menu displays that are typical in the North American fast food business.
The new store in McDonough, Georgia has no dine-in and therefore no order counter with menu displays or self-service touchscreens, and instead of pre-sell and menu displays seen by motorists, there are staff members out in the lot taking orders on tablets.
The building has its kitchen on a second floor, and uses a conveyor belt system that lowers filled orders down to ground-level “meal fulfillment areas.” There are two lanes for people who used an app to order ahead (they check-in with the app once in the lot) and two more traditional lanes, where people can place orders with staff equipped with “line-buster” POS tablets.
Chick-fil-A has made it clear this is a prototype that exists to test ideas. Chick-fil-A has far fewer stores than other national brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks, but its sales per store have been described as “insane.” So what the company does is influential, particularly when a lot of its success is attributed to the quality of customer service.
This may well be too labor-intensive and expensive for most operators, and therefore not something that will be widely adopted or replicated. But it can’t be the best of moments for vendors who target displays and software, as well as deployment services, for the QSR industry, if that industry develops and expands a model that doesn’t use menu displays in the stores or the drive-thru.
Something to watch!
While this is interesting, I definitely wouldn’t consider it worrying. I am a huge proponent of digital menu boards as a QSRs MOST important digital channel, in that it is able to impact roughly 70% of customer transactions at the point of purchase, and creates a one to one relationship with the customer, which with the right data analytics can provide a closed loop to enable performance marketing. (Just because no one is doing that effectively today does not mean that that should not be the true north star for the industry.) The potential to influence customer purchase behavior to that extent simply doesn’t exist anywhere else in the QSR ecosystem. That said, we can’t ignore that what Chick-fil-A is doing, and has been doing for some time, is fundamentally disrupting the drive thru service model with its line busters (yes, I am being that dramatic). So digital menu boards for Chick-fil-A literally make no sense – the majority of customers order before they reach that point. That said, what Chick-fil-A has failed to do is to maximize the opportunity to influence customer sales in the drive thru. By not really investigating the best way to put merchandising in front of customers just before they are ordering, and as they are ordering, they are missing a huge opportunity, and creating a poor customer experience for every customer who doesn’t know exactly what they want already. I remain incredibly bullish on digital menu board as a channel and expect to see incredible innovation in the next 24 months. While Chick-fil-A may have the volume to warrant not caring about juicing every single customer transaction, they are basically alone in that regard.
Great insights, Jackie. Thanks!
Not very many items on menu board. In and Out does same thing. Though they offer dining room option. The question is how many of those customers are repeat customers probably mobile ordered in advance. Majority of customers are Chick-Fil-A people