Taco Bell — Restaurant in Apex

Man, where to start. I despise posting lengthy reviews, but my experience at this place last night may have been the worst experience I've ever had with service at a fast food place in my life. I'm a local who has been to this Taco Bell dozens of times. It's one of my all time favorite fast food places and Taco Bell location because they consistently do a great job making the food. I am almost always okay with waiting a little for the food, but last night was quite different: I arrived at this Taco Bell around 7:25pm, knowing that this location closes at 8pm now. The line was up to the edge of the parking lot, but I figured this would be fine since this drive thru can really only hold up to about 10-12 vehicles in it at one time before it gets to this point. I waited about 15min and moved maybe 2-3 cars up in the line. At this point, I wanted to leave, but once you get into this drive thru you are in a pickle because there is no way to get out once another car has come behind you. Now that i'm committed by the poorly designed drive thru of this location I just decide to wait. After approximately 37min and around 5-6 vehicles of movement, I finally arrive at the drive thru speaker to place my order. I was greeted with a, "we're closed, sir". Baffled, I looked at my clock to see that it was 8:02pm. Regardless of the time, I was surprised that they would try to deny my order, knowing full well that they have had customers waiting there for 35-40min to get fast food. There are a few issues here:

1.) Yes they are short-staffed and that is why they close earlier. We all understand this and will typically be okay with longer wait times....within reason....

2.) The staff was focused on cleaning the store so they could leave promptly at 8pm rather than attending to the primary responsibility of any restaurant: serving the customers food. Wait times were excruciatingly long for single orders as if each order had to be made from scratch. I saw 2 employees spend about 15min just sweeping the lobby while the drive thru backed up even further. That's a lot of labor to expend on a simple task if you're short-staffed.

3.) The staff made no attempt to alert customers in the drive-thru that they would be unable to order food once they arrived at the window because of abnormally long wait times to prepare the food (roughly 7-8min per vehicle). This could have been resolved by a single employee and a couple of traffic cones to alert the customers and block off the drive thru entrance from further traffic.

Thankfully, the manager was reasonable enough to allow me to order food even though it was 2min past their posted closing time. The food they made this time around was epic. Likely the best and freshest taco bell i've ever had, which earns this place a second star. The third star comes from the fact that I love this location and I understand that they are understaffed right now. However, understaffing was not the entire issue here- this group was completely unfocused and disorganized . Please get it together...

Updated May 8, 2024 - STAY AWAY!! The staffing today was beyond a miss. The drive through staff member said that her computer froze and asked that I come in to place the order. Most likely true and not her fault, yet that wasn’t the bad part. As I walk through the fingerprint covered doors, I notice a staff member behind the counter eating her meal behind the counter and watching customers walk by. There wasn’t a person to take my order, yet some large fingerprint covered touchscreens. This isn’t the bad part yet. The touchscreens were not very responsive as I started placing my order. The staff member continued to eat her meal in front of me behind the counter as I struggled with this machine. An elderly customer walked in behind me to place an order and looked completely lost. They went to the counter and asked to place an order and the drive through staff member just pointed to the screens and said “the screens are there”. The gentleman mumbled something as if he didn’t know how. I was going to help him as it didn’t seem the employees were going to, until the employee said a few moments later, “what? You don’t know how to work the machines?” The other employee that was eating her meal then slammed something on the counter and stomped off into the back with a bothered “psshh”. The elderly gentleman turned around and walked out. I stopped ordering and walked out with him.

Never again unless someone responds and assures me that they have corrected this. They can start by cleaning the place, training the staff, and integrating technology that supports your team and doesn’t overtly cause them to feel slighted and fight it at the cost of your customer base.

Decent for a Taco Bell. The service has been hit and miss with staffing issues over the last couple of years. When they aren’t too busy, it seems like they do pretty well. The Bojangles next door doesn’t seem to have the same staffing issues though. I wonder if it is a corporate issue, or more local. Hopefully they will get the staffing right and be back where they were a...

I don’t usually ever bother to leave reviews but this time was an exception due to how bad the service was. We started off at the drive through and half way through our order being taken, was told something was wrong with the system and we would have to order inside. Inside, we placed our order on a self order kiosk (we could order through their ticketing system but theirs was down?). I then waited 20 MINUTES for our order without my name being called. I eventually got impatient and asked them if my order was ready and they asked around and pulled a bag from the side counter saying if this was it. I had to reconfirm our order and name and asked why they hadn’t called my name. They said they had but I doubt this as neither of us had heard it while waiting. I understand that working at fast food places can be strenuous and chaotic but I think we were more than patient. At this point we get our drinks and food and go back to our home, and come to find I’m missing an entire burrito from my order, the guacamole for my chips, and two whole tacos from her meal! For reference we’d gotten the Street Chalupas and Luxe Cravings boxes. They’d also forgotten to put in pretty much all the add-ons to the food we did get. There was many other small things like delays or quips that I’m not gonna bother to detail out. Just overall, this was an extremely time consuming and frustrating ordeal when this should be a fast food place, not a sit down restaurant. The food we DID get was decent, and I do want to add we’ve ordered from here before with minimal issues in the past so hopefully this was just a...