Which chain first rolled out separate pay and pickup windows at scale? At our Dallas site we see a consistent 18-second per-car gain from 11:30–1:30 and cleaner handoffs, but I’m looking for the origin story and when it went chain-wide.
Not to start a ketchup war, but most sources credit McDonald’s with taking the two-window (cashier + ‘presenter’) setup chainwide in the late ’80s/early ’90s after earlier one-offs at places like Wendy’s and Jack in the Box. For a breadcrumb, McD’s 2013 ‘third window’ piece references the already-standard two-window flow: https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-adds-third-window-2013-11; are your 18 seconds coming more from card-at-window or from staging at the presenter?