Yesterday I decided to try In N Out, and after waiting 15 minutes in the drive through and realize I'm not even halfway through (since the line curves around in weird places) I decided to get something else. It seems like it's a good day if you can get your food from In N Out in order 30 minutes.
Now this brings me a question, with the line it looks like they can process one order every 2 minutes or so on drive through. Let's say you double that for the people who sit inside (even though drive through tends to get more priority) then that means you can only make 1 sales per minute no matter what. It does not appear In N Out have better margins than your average fast food (after all prices are competitive), so how the heck does it work with such a low volume of business? I mean sure it looks like it's always packed but if it takes 30 minutes for McDonald to process your order it'd be pretty packed too (assuming people didn't get tired of waiting). I know some In N Out basically looks like a small hut with a kitchen so the overhead is very low so you can afford to have less volume, but the one I went to looks like a full fledged fast food chain with plenty of real estate space. As far as I know rent is charged by the size of the place, and yet bigger In N Outs don't seem to process food any faster, so I'm not sure how viable the model is if you own a large In N Out chain.
Now this brings me a question, with the line it looks like they can process one order every 2 minutes or so on drive through. Let's say you double that for the people who sit inside (even though drive through tends to get more priority) then that means you can only make 1 sales per minute no matter what. It does not appear In N Out have better margins than your average fast food (after all prices are competitive), so how the heck does it work with such a low volume of business? I mean sure it looks like it's always packed but if it takes 30 minutes for McDonald to process your order it'd be pretty packed too (assuming people didn't get tired of waiting). I know some In N Out basically looks like a small hut with a kitchen so the overhead is very low so you can afford to have less volume, but the one I went to looks like a full fledged fast food chain with plenty of real estate space. As far as I know rent is charged by the size of the place, and yet bigger In N Outs don't seem to process food any faster, so I'm not sure how viable the model is if you own a large In N Out chain.
