As someone who worked in an understaffed fast food restaurant for like 3 years… No, going inside doesn’t make your order faster. From my experience, orders get made in chronological order of when they were placed. You may be able to place your order quicker (if you’re lucky there’s enough staff to take an in-store order while there’s people in the drive through) but you will probably still wait about the same since the food can only be made so fast, and the few people have to splits their attention even more.
If it’s a normally staffed restaurant then you might have luck, but usually long wait times in the drive through aren’t because the drive through itself is slow… Excluding the random people who pull up with the good ol’, “can I get a uuuuuhhhhhhh…”
that’s when the app shines. You basically cut the ordering queue, which drive through users cannot avoid at all.
Also even if stuffs are prepared in chronological order, they don’t literally need to fulfill everything in earlier orders before starting to work on the next one. In drive through if someone order something that takes longer to prepare it would clog up the queue that someone might not be able to even start ordering. The lack of parallelism is very visible especially when you do a walk in order and order very few items right after someone who orders a lot, you will often get your order first, despite their orders’ preparation started before yours.
That depends on a lot of factors as well, a lot of fast food isn’t made to order and some can be created ahead of time if you’re expecting a lot of orders to come in. Fries, burger patties, some other fried goods like chicken fingers can be held for a little while without them going bad. There’s always the chance that the people working the kitchen may have had the smaller order on hand but needed to make some fresh things for the larger order.
