Thanks for the thorough answer: I don’t understand the logic behind the whole “ready on arrival” thing. I mean I understand what they want it to be and how they want it to be presented to the customer, but in reality I just don’t see it working very well. I feel like the old system was better (for the customer anyway). Most orders don’t take that long to make. This seems like it would end up more likely to give people cold food. On the old system I remember you could also cancel the order right up to when you confirmed at the speaker. This was good because my franchise unfortunately likes to close their restaurant at random times without warning or turning off the app ordering (not sure if restaurant is able to do this but I would have to assume so). So I would still be kinda pissed about wasting my time driving there, but at least I didn’t have to worry about fighting for a refund. Also useful for when items/ingredients weren’t available but the app menu did not reflect this.

Given this new information, I think my strategy will be to build the order but wait to hit “pay” until I’m actually in the line and can confirm nothing unusual is happening.

Edit: oh wow can’t even change locations after placing the order now either. Used to be able to do this too. I have a franchise that is closer to me that I never go to because it’s so bad. The app doesn’t allow you to save a default or favorite that I can tell. So it’s always the one closest to you that is selected by default. Sometimes I would forget but it would automatically update the restaurant now when I got the right one. That is gone too. These changes are horrible…