In a fast food establishment such as McDonald's customers are very sensitive to wait times. This may lead you to the conclusion that we then want to quickly rus

In a fast food establishment such as McDonald's customers are very sensitive to wait times. This may lead you to the conclusion that we then want to quickly rush all customers through ordering and then take as long as necessary to make the food. Unfortunately, customers hate waiting after ordering more than they hate waiting before ordering. If a customer walks in and sees either no line or a very short line to order, the customer will think, "oh it will be no more then five minutes, I'll be in and out". If there is actually a 45 minute wait after ordering, then yes you just scored on sale. However, the customer will now feel tricked, having been let down on the promise of quick; the customer is now late back from lunch and has a bad feeling as they leave. This does not convert to more future sales. Smoothing out the spikes is exactly what you want to be doing. The drive-thru has this built in. Customers come through in a queue and can easily see how long they will have to wait by counting cars. It makes a lot of sense to implement something similar with the self-serve kiosks. I work at a fast food establishment with self-serve kiosks. When we are understaffed (as we often are nowadays) and we are busy, we will turn off some of the kiosks rather than let orders build up. We would much rather lose a few customers today than lose these customers forever as they have to wait 45 minutes for their food because we rushed them through ordering without proper queue management.