Your Jaw Will Drop When You Hear What KFC Just Announced About Their Drive-Thrus–We Didn’t See This Coming!
November 20, 2021 by Justine Schwartz
KFC has just announced a new format for restaurants aimed at steering customers *away* from the drive-thru, in one of the more bizarre pieces of restaurant news we’ve seen since Covid. The chicken chain recently launched their “Quick Pick-Up” ordering model in the U.S. that encourages diners to place their order ahead of time on their app or website, drive to a KFC location, park in a dedicated pick-up spot, and walk into to grab their food from a self-serve shelf near the register.
While this grab-and-go model isn’t unusual in 2021, what’s somewhat unusual is KFC’s explicit goal in the whole thing: to get people out of their cars. Here’s how it all came to be: after learning via a customer survey that the speed of their drive-thru times decreased by 26 seconds in 2021 to 6 minutes, 30 seconds (and we know how important drive-thru times are for these chains), the company decided it wanted to get people out of those lanes–fast.
Yes, you read that right, KFC actually wants customers to ditch their drive-thru lines and walk inside. In a global health crisis.