I would be pissed off if my order got delayed because they prioritized someone in the restaurant who came in after I ordered.
FIFO/queue has been around forever in F & B.
Dining in person is in part (maybe large part) about the experience of being there and being served, even for lower budget fare. This is restauranting 101. If a restaurateur cares about their customers they'll set an appropriate rate limit on call in orders so that they can properly prioritize dine-in customers.
Those that don't are optimizing for revenue since of course online customers will pick another place if the reported delay is too long. It's customer hostile to keep your dine-in customer captive for 45 minutes because they are there and will sit there and be "forced" to accept it due to a kind of sunk time fallacy.
And you can't really hire for peak times if your peak to average ratio is too high.
Do you not find it rude that when there's a long line at your favorite coffee shop or whatever, that people that come late order online using their phone then move over to the pickup? Getting served before the folks in front of them in the physical queue?
In short: customer service matters in the restaurant industry and that is why online order shouldn't be served first, simply based on having a single queue for orders.
Yes, it's the restaurant responsibility to rate the customers coming in so that they can serve dine-in customers in a reasonable amount of time.
That doesn't entitle the dine-in customers to cut the queue.
> Do you not find it rude that when there's a long line at your favorite coffee shop or whatever, that people that come late order online using their phone then move over to the pickup? Getting served before the folks in front of them in the physical queue?
I do not know where you live but where I am, there are shops that have a separate queue for dine-in and take out. No one would bat an eye if you decide to go take-out instead for faster service
I don’t understand how it’s rude to do this. If everyone did that they’d still be served in FIFO order, and they’d save the overhead of ordering verbally so the system as a whole would be more efficient.
Few restaurants have their own delivery drivers, and for many, delivery services were the only way they could sell their food during lockdowns. Even at a loss, it made sense to have revenue. But that does not explain why restaurants continue to fulfill delivery orders now -- the only reason they still do it now is that they do make some money from it.