Analysis of Expected and Actual Waiting Time in Fast Food Restaurants

Abstract

People are willing to queue and pay to get food. Knowing peoples’ opinions on queuing is of interest to restaurant stakeholders since it and related actions have a direct effect on revenue. While most previous studies focused on dine-in restaurants, we observed queuing for fast food restaurants. Specifically, we observed the actual waiting time of customers for a number of fast food restaurants, and compared the metrics with waiting times that customers expected. During lunch time peak hours, customers spent on average 5.4 minutes waiting before they could get their orders. The 5.4 minutes consisted of 2.42 minutes of queuing time and 2.98 minutes of service time. This total waiting time is only slightly below the actual expected waiting time of 5.42 minutes. How the fast food restaurants try to manage the perceived waiting time of customers was also discussed.

Keywords: Restaurant, queuing time, queue management, waiting time, customer satisfaction