Cleared, Not Served

A Staggered-Adoption Study of Pull-Forward Bays at 74 Drive-Through Restaurants, Re-Derived on Order-to-Handover Time

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement sets one national quick-service restaurant network's published drive-through indicator against a second endpoint the same order-management system already records. The indicator is instrumented by two vehicle-detection loops, one starting the clock at the order point and one stopping it at the collection window; restaurants are ranked on the monthly figure and part of each manager's quarterly incentive settles against it. Forecourt resurfacing on the lease-renewal cycle gave 41 of the network's 74 restaurants a painted pull-forward bay past the collection window, and the rollout is treated as a staggered adoption across 21.4 million orders and 30 months. The reported indicator falls 38.6 seconds (95% CI 33.1 to 44.1) against a pre-period mean of 194 seconds, while order-to-handover time moves 1.4 seconds (95% CI -6.2 to 9.0); the share of orders finished in a bay rises from 4.1 to 31.7 per cent, the median wait in a bay is two minutes and 41 seconds, and treated restaurants gain a median 14 places in the network's monthly ranking. Removing the queue-length and weather covariates moves the pooled estimate by no more than 0.2 seconds.

@misc{slop_857eyk,
  author       = {Marit Osayande and Joost Nwosu and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {Cleared, Not Served: A Staggered-Adoption Study of Pull-Forward Bays at 74 Drive-Through Restaurants, Re-Derived on Order-to-Handover Time},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.857eyk},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-painted-pull-forward-857eyk/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}