To You, It’s a Simple Wrong Order. To Your Fast Food or Delivery Customer, It’s Worse than If They Hadn’t Ordered
Fast food restaurants and delivery services don’t just promise food. They promise convenience, and they promise that if nothing else in my life today is easy… this can be.
So when they get it wrong, it’s not just a few minutes wasted — it’s crucial time that already had limitations tied to it. And this needs to be acknowledged when making it right.
When I have to call the store or go back because of a wrong order, that isn’t the 15–20 minutes I originally wanted or needed to spend.
It’s more like an hour on top of that time.
It also means I have to do something else about the meal that my choice was supposed to solve… or it means that I don’t have time to eat anything at all.
Granted, fast food workers and delivery drivers are human, too, with their own complicated days and mistakes. They happen… but when they happen, the price of that mistake for the customer needs to be acknowledged.
Offering the right meal that I paid for at a completely different time “for free” or giving me a partial refund for the missing items misses the point of the actual service you provide and why your customers choose you.
Today’s GrubHub Delivery Experience
My car is in the shop and I work from home — too far away from any place convenient, especially in the rain. Today sounded like the perfect time to try out the new Grub Hub membership that Amazon Prime advertised.
I had leftovers in the fridge, but I was out of anything really good to drink, and my pounding head was screaming “caffeine.” Ice tea was called for, and nobody in the area has better unsweetened iced tea with lemon than Chick-fil-A.
Twenty minutes later, I got the text that my order had been delivered, but when I opened the front door only one small bag sat on my wet doormat and it clearly didn’t have an iced tea inside it.
The sticker on the bag had the complete order and it said “unsweetened iced tea with lemon.”
On top of that, the grilled chicken nuggets were already cold, so it looked like I was reheating food anyway.
Sure, GrubHub’s customer service quickly “resolved the situation” by refunding my money (that should arrive in my account in a couple of days). I think the representative said she refunded the whole order, which is better than the original “the drink?” she mentioned.
But I still have a headache. My meal was dissatisfying.
I should’ve gone with the leftovers. I will hesitate the next time I think about doing delivery again.
Chick-Fil-A Goes Back and Forth in Accuracy
Sorry to call out my local Chick-Fil-A, but with a gluten allergy, they are one of my only possibilities — and for that, I’m truly grateful… it could’ve just as easily been Wendy's, McDonald's, etc., if I could eat them without severe pain.
I love Chick-fil-A. I love the friendliness, the relatively healthy options, and even the fact that their employees can count on Sunday off, which is nice no matter who you are or what you believe… even if it’s nothing at all.
It probably has something to do with the normal cycling of employees, but there are months every order is just right, and then there are periods where they mess up every single order for weeks. And just as I trust them again, we enter into one of those new cycles.
Three times this past month, my sweet husband needed to work late, but so we could eat together, he offered to come home with Chick-fil-A.
All three times, he stumbled in the door exhausted but happy to be able to sit down with me and have a peaceful dinner at 9:50 at night.
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All three times, we looked in the bag and found fried, breaded chicken nuggets instead of grilled.
All three times, the order on the sticker receipt on the bag said “grilled nuggets.”
With my gluten allergy, this meant peanut butter and rice crackers with my kale crunch side salad for my dinner and a tired, frustrated husband who wouldn’t have had the energy to go back and make it right… delaying dinner to 11. (If they hadn’t closed at 10)
Maybe he should’ve checked before he left the drive-thru… but did I mention he was tired? And he DID make it a point the last two of those times to tell the order taker that it had been messed up before and it needed to be correct.
(Of course, any restaurant with any drive-thru or take-out makes these mistakes. But one place it doesn’t happen is the only other fast food restaurant I can eat at… In-n-Out.)
But that’s not the point.
When the order is wrong, the customer loses more than a meal
When a full-service restaurant gets a meal wrong, it’s an annoyance, but it can be fixed in a few minutes because the kitchen is a few steps away and the delay is only a few minutes … so crediting the error on the bill makes up for the difficulty caused.
When a drive-thru or take-out order is wrong, the burden falls on the customer to make it right:
Time: The customer calls the manager, endures the recordings, and waits on hold. Then they need to take the time to drive to the restaurant. It also takes additional time at the cashier to have them find the credit and process it.
Fuel costs: The customer needs to drive back to the restaurant in order to get their credited food (which in an era where Chick-fil-As have delivery cars or services, maybe they could make this part easier on the customer).
Meal costs: If their meal is wrong, the customer has to spend more money in that moment to find something else to eat. We’re not eating at Chick-fil-A because we’re rich. And if they were on a work break, in a hurry, or putting off a grocery run, they might go hungry.
The manager can rationalize, “We let you keep the other food, and we’ll replace the right one next time you come in.” But how is that a favor if the customer doesn’t want to eat the mistake or can’t?
You need to remember, you haven’t promised your customers good food. People might make concessions for truly good food. You deliver adequate food… and even though you raised the bar on what most fast food customers consider “adequate,” it’s still fast food, so therefore… adequate.
Your real promise is adequate food that’s wonderfully convenient. But adequate food that’s frustratingly inconvenient is infuriating x10.
So while the manager can say, “I’ll replace the food when you come in again,” it doesn’t take away the fact that the flub has made the experience worse than if the customer had chosen not to grace their drive-thru at all—much worse.
Several years ago, if the Chick-fil-A cashier decided I’d waited in the drive-thru too long (even though the thought hadn’t even occurred to me yet) or if they got my order wrong, I found myself with a stack of coupons for free food… along with making that order right — without even asking. Chik-fil-A hasn’t done that in years… but that went a long way to making me feel better about the experience.
If it’s about convenience (and not about food), how do you make it right?
So if convenience is really the point of what you’re selling, how do you redeem a mistake and turn that meal around for a disgruntled customer?
The reality is… you can’t.
If I got home with a wrong meal… that meal can’t be fixed.
But you can redeem the experience by going further with how you compensate for that mistak
Managers and corporate all need to consider this when the primary service they offer is convenience. Because when you add in the inflation price hikes, convenience is all you have over your competition.
Last week, I drove to Chick-fil-A but decided to go sit down in the CAVA nearby so that I could thoroughly enjoy my meal. It wasn’t as convenient, but it was delicious and cost the same amount of money with a guarantee that I’d get what I ordered. That is what you’re competing against and if you think it’s just fixing an order… you’ll lose.
