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They call it fast food for a reason. So when it comes to how long it takes cars to get their order after they’ve pulled into a drive-thru lane line, chains are like Nascar pit crews, constantly analyzing every move to win the race.
And if there’s a Daytona 500 for drive-thrus, it’s the Intouch Insight Annual Drive-Thru Study, which for 23 years has measured the time it takes for leading quick-service restaurants to get orders into hungry motorists’ hands.
Readers, start your engines:
- Among 10 top fast food restaurants ranked this year, the winner is Taco Bell, with an average wait time—measured from the time cars pull into the line until they get their orders—of 278.84 seconds, shaving 39 seconds off its average last year (317.89 seconds).
- KFC, which won the gold last year, placed third with a total of 303.95 seconds, a feather over a second longer than it took last year (302.63).
- Dead last was Chik-fil-A, which took an average of 436.09 seconds, a 73-second improvement over its average last year (509.13 seconds) but still nearly three minutes (157.25 seconds) behind Taco Bell.
Would you like some fries context with that? One reason it’ll take you a spell to get through the Chik-fil-A line is because so many people apparently want to eat mor chikin.
- Chik-fil-A had the most cars in line to get to the order-taking speaker: 3.41, followed by McDonald’s (2.01) and Wendy’s (1.5), with Taco Bell having an average of only .96 cars (because it lost a bumper?).
As for the burger behemoths, neither McDonald’s nor Burger King have ranked in the top 5 for the last two years. The last time McDonald’s was lovin’ it was in 2021, when it ranked second.
“The average total time” across all chains “decreased by 29 seconds over last year,” the study reported.
The drivers who do the testing are incognito—or in Taco Bell’s case, in-Dorito—when they test restaurants. This year they completed a total of 1,491 time trials at drive-thrus for the 10 chains across the US in June and July. If any of them started the exercise with new-car smell, chances are they didn’t finish it that way.