It’s Time We Got Honest About Chick-Fil-A

I need to make two things clear before I dig into this. The first is that I like Chick-Fil-A. Specifically, I like their chicken-egg-cheese biscuit. Had it earlier today. It might be my favorite breakfast sandwich (and I love me a good breakfast sandwich). The second is that while I do have the impression I disagree with them on some social/theological grounds, I don’t have any grudge against them…over that.

I do have a grudge against Chick-Fil-A over how much of a pain in the ass they make it to pick up food from them as a delivery driver. There is one Chick-Fil-A in Austin where it’s easy to pick up the food (the one by West Campus, obviously). There are approximately one dozen Chick-Fil-A’s in Austin where it is not easy to pick up the food—Chick-Fil-A’s where picking up the food is at best confusing and at worst life-threatening. Take the one on Ben White, for example: There’s been a line out of that parking lot onto the frontage road running fifteen to fifty cars deep continuously since March (with the exception of Sundays, of course). Trucks hurtle by at 70 miles per hour, merging into what’s become the turn-out lane while people try to exit the parking lot, their view entirely blocked by the Austin equivalent of those shots of the Los Angeles freeways the night before Thanksgiving. Inside the parking lot, there are cones everywhere. There’s an overwhelmed employee trying to direct traffic into a drive-through, jamming the thing up further because everyone has navigated a drive-through before and this is nothing new so any instructions are going to be counterproductive and this poor employee is just blocking traffic with their body. There are other employees scampering around between car windows carrying bags of food and asking everyone, “Are you Gerald?” even though whoever Gerald is has already texted the text-us-your-name-and-what-spot-you’re-in number they’ve got posted in front of every parking spot and is now blocked into his spot by a van that somehow was directed into the nonexistent fourth lane of the drive-through and has decided the best course of action from here is to await further instruction from the aforementioned untrained traffic cop who’s currently about to start sobbing and collapse in front of a Hummer proceeding forward at two miles per hour while its driver texts and the eight-year-old in the passenger seat plays Angry Birds: Outer Space on his iPhone. It’s a mess. It’s a disaster. They aren’t even trying to change things (besides moving the curbside/delivery parking spots away from the bank once the bank opened back up, creating an even thicker jam within the parking lot). And while this is the worst of the Chick-Fil-A’s in Austin, it’s not alone in its clusterfuckedness. It took me ten minutes to find the curbside/delivery spots at one in Bee Cave last Friday, and only five of those minutes were my fault (“The spots are across from the bank,” I was told, when the spots were not across from the bank they were between Chick-Fil-A and the bank, and why are Chick-Fil-A’s stealing parking spots from so many banks in the first place??).

This is the grudge that’s prompting this exposé. Chick-Fil-A, at least in Austin, cannot do what pretty much every other fast food and/or fast casual restaurant has figured out how to do over the last three and a half months: Create a system in which food can be picked up by customers and delivery drivers without anyone fearing for their life. Even Burger King, which is consistently out of half the things on their menu but is still letting people order those things online (this is also a nightmare but Burger King isn’t pretending to be anything they’re not), has made it easy for people to get in and out of their parking lot and/or building without squealing their tires and yelling a Hail Mary (now that I write this, it does occur to me that increased prayer may be Chick-Fil-A’s goal here).

But while this utter failure in the face of difficulty is what prompted the grudge that prompted this exposé, it’s not the subject of the exposé. The subject of the exposé is the fact that this failure isn’t really all that surprising. Because Chick-Fil-A doesn’t really have good service.

Think about it for a minute.

Yes, they’re polite. Often robotic. Sometimes creepy. But always polite. But is the service good? Does the food come out quickly? You’re pausing. You don’t know. You too have been wooed by the aura Chick-Fil-A’s crafted that states that they do have good service and that to question this is blasphemous. Think about the lines, dear reader. Are the lines long because a lot of people want Chick-Fil-A? Or are the lines long because Chick-Fil-A frequently becomes overwhelmed during the lunchtime rush and can’t get food out in a timely manner?

Again: Yes, they’re polite. But the phrase is “Service WITH a smile,” not “Service: a smile.”

Pay attention the next time you’re at a Chick-Fil-A. Are things actually running smoothly? Is the process actually “efficient,” as a fellow Texas Longhorns basketball writer called it recently online? If so, consider yourself either lucky or hopelessly brainwashed. What’s more likely the case is that you can tell these kids are trying hard, and they’re being so nice about it all (unless you’re at the one in Bee Cave in which case they, like all teens in Bee Cave I have encountered since moving to Texas, are punks, and are only working this job because their youth pastor sang them a song about how God wanted them to work with this youth pastor at Chick-Fil-A or because their parents think they need a job to stop them from being punks or because they actually need a job because their parents spent way too much on their three family BMW’s and now they’re going to have student loans when they go off to Texas State next year). And because you can tell that, and because you’ve been told the service is, in fact, good service, you’re happy to wait.

I have no quarrel with Chick-Fil-A. Well, I do, but it’s confined to the Stuber Eats world. I’ll keep getting that breakfast sandwich at my current pace. But I will not sit here and pretend that Chick-Fil-A has good service when it does not have good service. Friendly service? Debatably. Polite service? Certainly. Bad service? Not really (it’s just mediocre). Good service? Absolutely not.