Culver's Customers Frequently Complain About This Drive-Thru Experience

Culver's is a fan favorite in the Midwest, serving up a line of rich ButterBurgers along with unique sides like cheese curds and famous frozen custards for desserts. While their cheeseburgers are some of the best in the burger chain biz, Culver's still has some service industry kinks to work out. Apparently, some of the most frequent customer complaints revolve around the excruciatingly slow drive-thru experience.

According to one customer on Reddit, "Culver's drive thru takes 30 min every time from pulling up to having food in my hand." Another Facebook thread wasn't as dramatic, but still complained that their food took 10 minutes, which is twice as long as customers are willing to wait in a fast food drive-thru line. While current Culver's employees assert that the goal is to get drive thru orders out in 4 minutes and walk up orders in 5 minutes, others alert complainers to the fact that wait times depend on what you order. One employee said that menu items like fish and fried chicken take 5 minutes to make which doesn't factor in the time it takes to package and deliver your order.

To add insult to injury, one employee says that the format of the drive-thru itself ends up trapping customers in line. "Our drive thru has a 3x3 grid for the drive thru. So when we're at max capacity there's going to be four people stuck in line if they get their food first," says the employee.

Culver's may be a fast food chain, but many customers and employees balk at one Redditor's opinion that "they need to take a page from McDonald's handbook." McDonald's may be fast, but, according to a former McDonald's employee, "we were allowed to cook a number of burgers and leave them in a drawer for a while ... The same thing was true with fries, chicken, fish, everything. Everything was precooked and then sat in a drawer." Culver's, on the other hand, prides itself on making its food to order. And that is a major source of praise from customers who rave about how fresh and delicious the food is. Consequently, a Culver's employee on Reddit emphasizes, "our motto is fresh food made only AFTER you order" and advises impatient customers not to "patronize restaurants like Culver's that value freshness, quality, and accuracy over speed and cheapness."

If you value made-to-order freshness, you're probably willing to wait a few extra minutes, especially considering Culver's employees will oblige some pretty creative menu hacks. For example, you can order your fries extra crispy so they won't get soggy on the drive home. If you want a decadently cheesy upgrade to your ButterBurger, you can swap the bun for two grilled cheese sandwiches!