The current wait time

This page is about where that number lives, how it gets set, and what to do when it's wrong, stale, or nobody's touched it yet. It applies to any restaurant taking phone orders — the number always exists, whether or not anyone's deliberately set it recently.

01What this number actually is

The current wait is not something the system estimates on its own from order volume, kitchen throughput, or anything else it observes. It's a plain number a person set, and every call from that point forward reads the same figure until someone changes it again. That's a deliberate design choice, not a limitation waiting to be improved away — a manager who knows the kitchen just got slammed, or just cleared out, can reflect that immediately, in a way a purely automated estimate reacting to historical patterns couldn't do as fast for a single unusual night. An algorithm watching order volume can only ever react to what already happened — it learns things slowed down after enough orders come in late, not the moment a fryer goes down. A manager standing on the floor knows that instantly, before a single order has been affected, and can reflect it in one tap.

That also means the number is only as current as the last person who touched it. A restaurant that sets it once at the start of a shift and never revisits it is quoting callers a number that may have stopped matching reality hours ago. There's no restriction on who can change it beyond being signed in on the tablet itself — it isn't locked to an owner or manager role the way some other settings are. That's deliberate: whoever's actually watching the kitchen in the moment is exactly who should be able to correct it without needing to find someone else first.

Getting it wrong in either direction has a real, practical cost, worth keeping in mind during a shift that's already busy enough to make updating a number feel like a low priority. A wait quoted shorter than reality means a customer who shows up expecting their order and finds it's not ready yet — a worse moment than if they'd simply been told the truth up front. A wait quoted longer than reality can just as easily cost an order outright, if a caller hears a number long enough to decide it's not worth it and hangs up before ever placing anything. Neither direction is better than the other; the number being close to true is what actually matters.

02How the number is labelled

Rather than presenting every quoted number the same way regardless of how fresh or reliable it is, the interface labels each estimate by exactly how it was produced. The console's own timing screen states this directly: “Every estimate is labelled by how it was produced — configured, estimated, verified, or stale.” Those four words are the real vocabulary, and they mean four genuinely different things, not four shades of the same idea.

The current wait a caller actually hears is the “configured” case in its cleanest form — a manager set it, directly, on the tablet in front of them. Pickup and delivery estimates elsewhere in the console can carry any of the four labels, depending on whether they've been set, left at a default, confirmed against reality, or gone unattended long enough to be flagged. Seeing “estimated” or “stale” next to a number is worth treating as a prompt to check it, not as a permanent state. “Verified” and “stale” sit at opposite ends of the same idea — how recently a human actually checked a figure against reality — independent of whether the underlying number itself happens to still be roughly correct; the label describes confidence in freshness, not a claim about whether it's currently right or wrong.

03Setting or updating it

The wait time lives on the tablet, not buried in a settings menu — because it's meant to be changed in the middle of a shift, quickly, by whoever's actually looking at how busy things are right now.

1. Open the wait time screen on the tablet. It shows the current quoted wait as one large number, in minutes, along with when it was last set and by whom.
2. Pick a new number from the preset options. A row of common values — 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, and 60 minutes — sits right below the current figure; tapping one sets it immediately.
3. Confirm it updated. The large number changes instantly, and the “last set” line updates right away — no separate save step or delay to wait through.

That's the whole mechanism — no confirmation dialog, no multi-step form, fast enough to update between orders during a rush. The operator console has its own, separate view of the same territory — a timing screen showing the pickup estimate, the delivery estimate, and the current wait actually being quoted, each of the first two carrying its own label from the vocabulary above. That screen is a review surface more than an editing one — useful for a manager checking in from the back office, but it shows what's currently set without its own way to change it. The tablet is where the number actually gets changed in the moment.

04A slower night than usual, worked through

A restaurant sets its wait to 20 minutes at the start of a Friday dinner shift — a normal, busy-but-manageable number for that time of week. Partway through service, a fryer goes down. Prep on several menu items slows immediately, well before enough orders have actually come in late enough for anyone to notice a pattern in the numbers.

The person running the pass notices right away, because they're standing next to the broken fryer. They open the tablet's wait time screen and tap 40 instead of 20. From that exact moment, every call the assistant answers quotes 40 minutes, not 20 — no lag, no waiting for enough data to catch up with what's actually happening in the kitchen.

An hour later, a second fryer comes online as a temporary fix and things start moving faster again. Someone taps 25. The number keeps moving with reality throughout the night, not because anything automated is tracking the fryer, but because the person closest to the actual kitchen has their hand on the control the whole time.

05When it doesn't hold up

• Nobody's set it yet. The number defaults to the estimated figure rather than showing nothing at all — a caller still gets an answer, it's just labelled “estimated” rather than “configured,” and the honest fix is for someone to set a real number once the restaurant's actually open and running.
• The number's gone stale. If enough time has passed since anyone touched or confirmed it, it's worth treating as unreliable regardless of what it currently reads — a quick check against how busy things actually are right now, and a new tap on the tablet, resolves it in seconds.
• A caller says the quoted wait didn't match reality. That's a signal the number needs updating, not necessarily that anything's broken — check what's currently set against what's actually true right now and correct it if it's drifted.
• The tablet isn't reachable to make the change. See Staff tablet issues if the tablet itself seems to be the problem rather than the number.
• Nobody's sure who last changed it, or when. The wait time screen always shows who set the current figure and roughly when, right next to the number itself — worth checking before assuming it's outdated; sometimes it was set correctly ten minutes ago and just needs updating again as conditions keep changing through a busy shift.