I would be shocked if some coffee or fast food chain somewhere is not already about to launch this. The drive-thru experience can often be such a downer, people (at least some I know) will sometimes prefer to park their car and go inside for more humane service. I am still fond of old-school-walk-in-and-talk-to-a-human style service, but that seems to be getting phased out more and more in favor of drive-thrus that translate both your voice and the servers voice into klingon with a distortion pedal and a 4khz bitrate.

So let’s put an end to that nonsense. Combine a drive-thru workflow with RFID technology and customer profiling, so that customers can keep their most commonly made order on file. It works like this:

1. A customer places their order at the drive-thru
2. The server places the order in their point-of-sale system
3. The server offers the customer “The Usual” card, which will retain their most commonly-requested order
4. The customer gets their order, and “The usual” card
5. Next time the customer returns to the drive-thru, they can place their order by waving “The Usual” card.
6. The customer modify “The Usual” card’s order be logging in to a website (with a serial # on the card) and changing their order, or they can make the change at the drive-thru.

There are a variety of ways this can be implemented. For example, a customer could keep a few cards on hand for a few different orders. Another option would be to link the RFID card to a touchscreen-style drivethru, so customers could place the initial order on the touchscreen, and then subsequent orders could be made with one-click when their order history is shown on the touch screen.

Many fast-food chains are already implementing RFID cards for quick payment. Given that each card would already have a unique ID attached to them, it might not be such a stretch to use this unique ID to store customer preferences, if the customer wishes to.