An Open Letter to Sonic Drive-In

March 20, 2016                     

Sonic Drive-In

300 Johnny Bench Dr

Oklahoma City OK 73104

Dear Sonic,

If taken literally, your promise to deliver “service with the speed of sound” has never been fulfilled but my experience generally has been service with an acceptable wait. Any wait when you are hungry is hard to endure, but our food always arrived well before we began to think concretely about cannibalism. Just as I was thinking, “Please, please, please, we’re dying out here!” two feet would appear under the sign and happiness would ensue. 

It was the promise implicit in your name that brought us to your Springville, Utah store.  We had left an event in a neighboring town and the children, hepped up on adrenalin from being a part of a huge celebration for the new LDS temple, didn’t want to go straight home.  They wanted a treat. As we drove by the BYU Creamery we saw a huge line and, remembering past waits in the ice cream line, decided to go a little further out from the venue and find a treat closer to home. We pulled into the parking lot at Sonic and saw six or seven cars at the drive-up window and several parking spots open. I decided I didn’t feel like idling for 10 minutes so I pulled into a parking spot, ordered, and paid.  And waited.  

At the point where, on any other visit, those two feet would appear under the sign, my seven year old daughter announced that she had to go to the bathroom. We had never had this issue at Sonic before so I didn’t even know if they *had* a public restroom. Plus I thought our food was imminent and I could neither send my 7 year old alone to find a bathroom nor leave my other daughter alone in the car while we did. And what would happen if our food came and nobody was in the car? I asked her if she could possibly hold it just a little longer. At 25 minutes into our wait I pushed the red button again to see if our order had been lost. He assured me they were working on it and would bring it out as soon as they could. 

At 30+ minutes, we all got out of the car and went to the door of the kitchen. A man in a headset came out quickly to see what we wanted. I told him about my daughter’s bathroom need and how long we had been waiting for our food. At this point we had spent 45 minutes trying to get out the parking lot of the Marriott Center not because it took that long to exit after an event but because the car at the head of the lane I had parked in was not willing to inch forward and nuzzle his way into the lane of cars that had a direct exit onto the road. Essentially, he was waiting for the entire parking lot to empty before trying to get out and we were all held captive by the parked cars on either side of our doomed line. It was incredibly infuriating. Also, we had been up and working on the presentation at the Marriott Center since 6 that morning.  You can imagine, then, how exhausted I was at 10:30 pm. You can imagine how forcefully I let the guy in the headset know how unacceptable this long wait was. He asked which order was ours and assured us he would hurry things along. We went to the bathroom and then back to the car thinking that at any minute our order would arrive. It would take another 15 minutes. 

I was pretty much boiling by the time those two feet appeared. She explained that there had been a large event (which we well knew) and that they had hoped some people would give up and leave but nobody did. I told her that we absolutely would have left if they hadn’t already TAKEN OUR MONEY. Also, did the people at the drive-up window wait 45 minutes to an hour? She was silent on that point but I knew they hadn’t. So as we sat there waiting for our food, who knows how many people butted ahead of us in line simply because we chose to park instead of idle? Is this honestly how Sonic does business? Choosing to turn off your car (an environmentally friendly thing we are encouraged to do) means choosing to be the LAST priority? You don’t have to answer that because I already know it is true. Not only did I watch it play out in front of my eyes, I crowd sourced it on Facebook. It’s not just a Springville, Utah thing. It’s a Sonic thing. And it is completely unacceptable.