Shake Shack wants to get faster, but only to a point

Shake Shack is considered a fast-casual chain, but the “fast” part of that has always been a little misleading, as the chain’s executives have long acknowledged, including the current CEO, Rob Lynch.

“We’re never going to be fast food,” he said at the TD Cowen Consumer Conference, according to a transcript on the financial services site AlphaSense. “We cook everything to order and that takes time.”

But that doesn’t mean that Shake Shack isn’t working to improve throughput inside its restaurants.

Shake Shack has cut more than a minute from service times under Lynch, but he said that the company’s real goal is more nuanced: The company really wants to prevent the number of disappointingly long waits for orders.

“We’re not trying to get another minute out,” Lynch said. “The one thing I would say is we are absolutely focused on not disappointing the guests. It’s not about moving from six to five minutes. It’s about eliminating nine and 10-minute occasions.”

The biggest challenge for Shake Shack is in its drive-thrus, which the company has rapidly opened over the past few years.

Customers who go through such lanes typically want their food quickly. But Shake Shack makes its burgers to order and, as Lynch says, is not fast food. In this case, he said, it’s about customer expectations.

“The guest has been conditioned that a drive-thru, especially an empty drive-thru, should be a one-minute model, and that’s never going to be our model,” he said. “We’re working to test and optimize the way we can appropriately set the expectations for the guest in the drive-thru so we’re not disappointing.

“Someone who comes to us the first time, who’s going to fast food, who pulls up and puts their order in and pulls around the window and has to wait five minutes, it’s going to leave a dissatisfied customer. Satisfaction is a function of expectations. So that is what we need to do better in the drive-thru.”

Shake Shack has worked on operations in recent years, optimizing labor in the restaurants to improve productivity. The company says it is working to support store managers and team members while holding them accountable on performance metrics.

And while the company works out ways to shift consumer expectations in the drive-thru, Lynch believes that the in-restaurant experience remains top-notch.

Speed is “not really an issue in the dining room,” he said. “People come into our dining room. There’s music playing. It’s always clean. Our team members are hospitable. So coming in and waiting six or seven minutes in the dining room, not a problem.”

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