What’s your most reliable move to shave 10–15 seconds without hurting the guest handoff? We run dual-lane with two tablets and average 2:58 window-to-window 11–1; I’m testing pre-bagging top five items and a cash cart, but I’m seeing mixed results on order accuracy.
Skip ‘pre-bagging top five’; we saved about 12s printing tablet labels and color-coding drink carriers by lane. You have label printers?
Do a quick ‘bag count’ callout at handoff; we saved about 10s without accuracy hits.
And we shaved about 10–12s by moving sauces to the tablet: order-taker taps a preset bundle (2/4/6) that prints on the bag label, and the window keeps matching pre-counted kits — no digging and accuracy went up; tiny caveat, cap oddball sauce requests so they don’t crush the gain. @e_smith89 ever tie sauce bundles to your label colors?
Shift drinks to the tablet team: they pour/lid and stage carriers by lane so the window only assembles food and hands — that picked up about 12–15s for us. Only catch: lock drink choices at tablets so edits don’t happen at the window; your “cash cart” can still verify names, not changes. Are your tablets close enough to a fountain to try it?
We took lane 2 “card-only” from 11–1 and had the tablets flag cash at greet to route those cars to lane 1; that cut about 12–14s window-to-window because the window stops juggling bills and can just hand off… It’s cleaner than a cash cart and we saw accuracy improve since the presenter isn’t splitting focus, but you’ll need clear cone signage and a floater for edge cases. Could you pilot it for a week and see if it nudges that 2:58 closer to 2:40?
At 2:58, print bag labels with item count + initials; leave ‘top five’ unbagged. You tracking car color yet?