Taco Bell — Restaurant in West Lafayette

Updated 3 months later Increasing a star, some improvement definitely recognized. Thank you for that! Now, I just wished there was a little better 2-way communication between the mobile app & the store you chose before starting your order. I arrived to find that they didn't have 1 new food item and 2 drink offerings which forced me to adjust my order to potentially cheaper menu items than what I already paid to receive.

Summary of last visit: ordered 2 items prior to arrival via their mobile app at ~5:40p on a Sunday for In Store (specifically to avoid Drive-Thru), received an incorrect bag of food 1.5 hours later.

I don't know what kind of staffing challenges they are having at this location but there at least seems to me to be a disconnect in priorities and queuing between various ordering methods: drive_thru, kiosk, TB mobile app, GrubHub/DoorDash/etc. Any order ahead app/service should do a better job of providing a decent customer expectation, i.e prevent ASAP option altogether during busy periods or pushing out schedule pickup times if that restaurant is too backlogged with orders. Maybe this location should discontinue 1-2 order-ahead services until they get things under better control?

I tried to remain patient amongst the chaos & am leaving a 2 star (instead of 1) solely because of the food prep lady who did do her best to observe the lobby & work with some irate customers to get them their orders...I did appreciate her efforts in a difficult & trying situation!

Updated 2 months later: I thought I'd give this location another shot, but it doesn't appear that much has improved. I ordered 10 items via the app again on a Sunday ~7p, it had both drive-thru and in-store options available which ended up being misleading. I chose the second option before commuting to avoid the line of cars I figured would inevitably be waiting there. I arrived to a locked lobby, where an employee was kind enough to answer the door but directed me to wait in the drive thru line 3/4 around the building. 30 minutes later I got a bag with only 9 items and 1 of those was obviously incorrect (didn't order the quesadilla). I waited at the window to figure out & communicate my 2 missing items while various employees alternated trying to work with me or insisting I pull forward. They did make my order right in the end which is the only reason why I didn't downgrade to a 1 star, but I will still be avoiding this location for the foreseeable future...will opt to drive out of my way to Teal Rd/26th Street location instead as I've had better accuracy & less...

PLEASE DONT WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY. Literally no joke is the worst Taco Bell and one of the worst places to eat in Lafayette. By no exaggeration, every single time I attempt to go to this taco bell on my lunch break or off work, the drive-through wait is no shorter than like 30 minutes. One time, I sat in the drive-through at the spot where you ordered, and I sat there for 15 minutes. Dead silence. I eventually had to leave because I had to work and wasted more than half my break waiting in line. So you go inside to order instead of waiting at the drive thru, and you're still waiting. Every time I've ordered inside, I've stood around for 20 minutes just to get like 2 items. The first time I went in, a guy had placed an online order and was literally waiting 55 minutes! He was understandably upset and the staff had essentially just been messing around instead of making what was in all reality, a small order for this guy. The staff lacks any urgency, and they will make you wait while they use their phones and talk to one another. No matter the time of day or how crowded the inside or drive-thru is, you will be waiting enough time to have gone to an actual Mexican restaurant and gotten food and left. No joke, that's how bad this place is. That's not even to mention how rude the staff is and how your order will be messed up more often than not. So you're quite literally waiting 30 minutes at a taco bell to get food that you're going to get into your car to discover the order has been screwed up anyway. Absolutely crazy. I'm actually kind of impressed that this location has been so bad for so long and nothing has changed. Judging from other people's experiences, this taco bell has been terrible for a while. So I'm really honestly quite surprised nothing has been...

I'm going to go ahead and point out what most people aren't. Management here is the problem. The Taco Bell's in Lafayette are some of the worst from here to Chicago. It's been this way for a long time now regardless of employee changes.

Be it Google reviews, door dash reviews, or reviews elsewhere. It's pretty agreed upon that this Taco Bell has terrible service. Slowest fast food in the area, quality issues with cold or extremely messy orders, and items missing or just entirely incorrect. Often whole orders being wrong.

It's really just a roll of the dice between having a subpar example of what Taco Bell usually offers, or just wasting your time and money entirely. Having a genuine good experience is almost entirely off the table.

If you ordered some sauce don't expect to get any, if your order has a drink don't forget to ask for it when you get your food or you won't get it, if you made specifications like no tomato, meat, etc, then you better check your bag before you leave. This all goes double for doordash, but hey, at least they'll refund $5 of your $15 order...

Anyway. Point being here that the management needs to step up pretty hard. Set expectations, actually watch over performance, talk to employees about how you can help them do their work better. Put in some effort, and maybe...