That question was answered for me last week when I tried to come up with a fun date night idea with my fiancee Caele. We decided that we wanted to do a blind fast food taste test. Our goal was to see who could guess more fast food burgers and fries correctly, and which burger and fries were the best. We drove to five different fast food restaurants in Kokomo: Rally’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King and Sonic. I’ll get into whether or not we could guess them correctly in a later blog. This blog answers the questions “which fast food restaurant is the cheapest?” And “which drive thru is the fastest?”
We went to each restaurant and ordered their cheapest burger plain with just cheese and a small fry. To my surprise each restaurant had a different price for this food.
- McDonalds was the cheapest at roughly $2.14 with tax. (the burger and fries were each a dollar).
- Wendy’s was slightly more expensive at like $2.30 or something (I lost the receipt).
- Rally’s had the cheapest burger at $.79, but the fries were more expensive and that put the total cost around $2.50. (Note: there is a value fry option that I didn’t know about. I ordered a small fry like I did for all restaurants).
- Burger King was slightly more expensive than that. The fries were surprisingly the most expensive item. The total came out to around $2.70
- Sonic was easily the most expensive as the total clocked in over 3 dollars. They don’t have a dollar menu at Sonic to my knowledge.
Does the cost reflect the deliciousness of the burger and fries? Well we’ll certainly find out soon (taste findings coming this Thursday)! But first lets talk drive through speed. I started my journey at roughly 5pm at Rally’s. From there I went to Wendy’s and then to McDonalds. From there I jumped over to Markland and went to Burger King and lastly I went to Sonic. I went through the drive through of each of these restaurants and keep in mind that this in total took me about an hour to get through everything. Here’s what I found from their speed:
- Rally’s was by far the fastest. I was the only one in line and it still felt like as soon as I pulled up to the window everything was ready. I was shocked how fast it went.
- Burger King was next. In my experience, Burger King is the most reliably fast drive through. As always, I was out in less than 5 minutes.
- Wendy’s comes in at number three for speed. Wendy’s had a line of roughly 3 people in front of me. So I suppose it’s not a fair test compared to Rally’s where I was the only one in line. But Burger King had about 5 people in front of me and was still faster than Wendy’s so I don’t know what to say.
- Sonic comes in next, but even though they ranked fourth, they were still pretty fast. At this point it was close to 6pm so the dinner rush was in full swing. I went to the drive thru not the stall on this encounter.
- Last was McDonalds. Mcdonalds sometimes makes me question the “fast” part of the fast food name. This isn’t a dig at McDonalds because there was by far the most people in line here. There always is. Whether it’s 6pm, 2am or 3pm there’s always a ton of people in line. Most of my time waiting for food was spent at Mcdonalds at a total of around 25 minutes. There was probably eight or nine people in front of me. Which if my math is correct means that McDonald’s took about 2.77 minutes per customer. Not bad and certainly faster than non-fast food restaurants.
What does this tell us? Does the price or speed affect the quality of the burger or fries? Either way, the fries and burger were both cold by the time that I got to eat them so later this week we’ll be answering the question “which fast food restaurant has the best cold food?” Still something interesting to know.
What has your experience been? Who is the fastest for you? Let us know in the comments and check out the blog coming this Thursday to find out which fast food is the best cold!
