The store used two lanes and more than 60 staffers to break the record. | Photos courtesy of Steve Smyth
At many McDonald’s restaurants, the goal is to serve drive-thru customers in 120 seconds, or about 30 cars an hour.
Almost 25 years ago, a McDonald’s in Cheyenne, Wyoming, dared to ask: What if we could do 400?
At the time, the record for the most cars served in an hour at a McDonald’s drive-thru was around 387, recalls Steve Smyth. Smyth is now director of restaurant technology for Taco John’s, but in 2001, he was the manager of that Cheyenne McDonald’s, where he’d worked since he was 16.
Breaking the record became something of an obsession for Smyth and his team.
“The franchisee I worked for, he liked to move cars,” Smyth said. “So we were all really focused on drive-thru operations.”
His store helped develop the “two-into-one” drive-thru format, with two order-taking lanes that merge into one for payment and pickup—now a common setup for many McDonald’s and other fast-food chains. In Cheyenne, there was a traditional speaker box, plus an employee sitting out in a cubby taking orders. Eventually, the store built a second cubby, allowing for even more volume.
In pursuit of the record, it got up to 200 cars an hour, then 250, then 300. But it kept maxing out its capacity. “So we just kept turning over rocks,” Smyth said.
The store installed a Vittleveyor, a specialized conveyor belt system that allowed customers to send money in and the restaurant to send food out. When combined with the regular pickup window, it allowed the restaurant to create a true dual-lane setup.
Manufactured by Ohio-based drive-thru supplier Bavis Fabacraft, the Vittleveyor was part of an early wave of automation in the restaurant industry. It was featured in a 1988 New York Times story with the headline “Robots to Make Fast Food Chains Still Faster.”
The Vittleveyor basket is pictured on the right. Customers inserted their payment under the red awning.
In Cheyenne, the Vittleveyor indeed helped Smyth and his team inch closer to that 387 mark. But it still couldn’t quite get over the hump, in part because the POS kept crashing under the heavy order load.
It turned to Panasonic, its POS supplier, for help. It ended up installing a more robust system called Power that was intended for full-service restaurants. It had never been used in a quick-service restaurant before.
“This system, it could actually handle two lanes,” Smyth said, “and so I was able to split screens.”
With the new POS in place, the store let the community in on its mission to break the record. It tried and failed several more times, topping out at about 380 cars an hour, with an average of 300.
And then one day, “everything just kind of worked,” Smyth said.
On Monday, July 9, the Cheyenne McDonald’s invited customers to help it go for the record once again. It had more than 60 people on staff, filling orders and racing back and forth between the drive-thru and the kitchen. Customers were told to order whatever they wanted: “It wasn’t like we were saying, ‘Make it easy on us,’” Smyth said.
According to a story in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, the restaurant sold 432 pounds of fries in that hour (and created a “nasty traffic jam” in the process, according to one onlooker).
The result: 407 cars served from noon to 1 p.m., or about one every nine seconds.
“I think my team did a phenomenal job,” Smyth told the newspaper at the time. “The energy is very high.”
The feat made the front page in Cheyenne.
Though Cheyenne may seem like an unlikely place to set such a record, the store was one of the oldest in the McDonald’s system, and also one of its highest-grossing. It did over $3 million in sales that year for the first time, thanks in part to its speedy service—and that’s with 29-cent hamburgers and 2 for $2 Big Macs.
“It took a lot of burgers to make $3 million, that’s for sure,” Smyth said. (The average McDonald’s generated about $4 million in 2024, per Technomic data.)
It was unclear if the 407 record still stands within the McDonald’s system; the chain had not responded to a question about drive-thru records as of publication time. Reports that the title now belongs to a location in Wichita are inaccurate: That store served 356 cars in an hour in 2023.
Cheyenne’s record has been broken by a Chick-fil-A in Raleigh, North Carolina, which in 2021 served more than 500 cars in an hour—reportedly a world record. It used the same two-lane setup that Smyth’s McDonald’s had 20 years earlier, as well as employees walking up and down the line taking orders on a tablet. These days, drive-thru customers can also order in advance using a mobile app.
Chick-fil-A has since opened a four-lane prototype with a conveyor belt system that it says can serve up to 720 cars an hour.
Smyth was recognized as an Outstanding Manager.
As for Smyth, his store’s performance in 2001 earned him an Outstanding Manager Award from McDonald’s in 2002. It came with a cash prize of $2,500, which he shared with his team.
In 2005, Smyth landed an operations job at Cheyenne-based Taco John’s, where his experience setting drive-thru records came in handy: The 14 Taco John’s he oversaw were using the same Panasonic POS system he’d helped install at McDonald’s. He helped them tap into its full capabilities.
“I was like, ‘Oh, hey, watch this,’” he said. “And we changed systemwide. I was like, ‘Yeah, we can do all this.’”
Around 2012, Taco John’s created a technology department and asked Smyth to be part of it. He’s gone on to overhaul much of the chain’s tech stack, including moving to a cloud-based POS system and implementing voice AI in some of its drive-thrus.
He said he would have loved to have had AI taking orders 20 years ago. “Just for the pure consistency of it and all these things, it just makes life easier inside the restaurant when it’s used properly,” he said.
And he still credits his experience hacking the drive-thru at McDonald’s for starting him on career path to restaurant tech.
