Standing in line at Publix, 12 people in line, one person working, and the other lady is preparing 20 mobile orders that are for an hour in advance. So we have to stand here for 25+ mins, then we get up there… They have 50+ lunch mobile orders that day. INSANE like WTF? Why do they allow this bullshit? Starbucks locations stopped doing it. Why does Publix allow it? Stand in line like the rest of us. Bullshit man. They wouldn’t even give them another person to make subs, just 1 person for the lunch rush line.
This is it, really. Fundamentally, the people placing online orders just want to exchange money for lunch, same as OP.
In the old days though, they would show up, see the line was too long, and some percentage of them would leave. Publix needs to increase staffing, implement rate limiting (I think they call it “Order Throttling” in this space), or partially prioritize the people who want their sandwich bad enough to spend their own time waiting. I assume there’s some metric that would optimize it, and even if not, some reasonable guesswork (alternate prep of in-person versus mobile orders?) would help with the physical traffic jam and angry luddites (no offense, OP 🤣).