Curbside Pickup Means We Can Say Goodbye To Long McDonald’s Drive-Thru Lines

The enduring appeal with fast food restaurants like McDonald’s is their drive-thru’s ease and convenience. But these days, anytime I roll up to one to grab a bite to eat, I have to endure a long line of cars to just order and get my meal. I don’t want to get out of my car so that I can just roll up and keep moving, but I don’t want to wait in the long line either.

To address this common scenario for many, the fast food giant has just announced some major changes to their business model.

In their annual investor meeting yesterday, McDonald’s unveiled their new “Global Growth Plan,” which featured some key new technological changes to their current restaurants, one of the biggest being mobile order and pay. The most exciting of these changes that comes with this new ordering method? CURBSIDE PICK-UP.

Instead of waiting in the drive-thru to place my order and pick it up, I can instead use the McDonald’s app to order and pay for my food and pick it up curbside once I get to the restaurant. Talk about extreme convenience.

Other new technological changes coming to the fast food chain include the addition of kiosks that can recognize a McDonald’s app profile and order and pay for your food. Someone will then bring the food out to you, meaning that you can now skip the front counter line when you walk into a McDonald’s.

Mobile order and pay is scheduled to roll out in 20,000 restaurants worldwide by the end of 2017, with curbside pickup supposedly being available for a part of that process.

All of these changes aim at speeding up the process for McDonald’s customers and keeping them coming in for fast service, which is something that should help them recover the 500 million customer transactions that CNBC says the company has lost since 2012.

I’m just happy I don’t have to wait in those God-awful long lines anymore.