First off, this is hilarious. Four whole minutes, oh no. Secondly, hasn't Wendy's been doing this forever? They're pretty successful.
Having worked at a Wendy's behind the grill, the fact that they're starting to grill the patties right when a customer orders is crazy. It takes 3-5 minutes for a patty to cook to servable temperatures, so we constantly loaded the grill up with new patties and staged them at regular intervals. We always had a bunch of patties in different stages of cooking so there would be ones ready whenever a customer ordered.
Different times of the day, you have different numbers of patties grilling - mid afternoon you might have a pretty light grill, but during dinner or lunch rush hour, the grill is fully loaded. If no customers ended up ordering a burger in time for a patty before it got too well done, we just shifted it off to a heated drawer to chop up later for "chili meat". I guess McD's doesn't have chili, so they don't have that natural recycling method for the unused patties, but they get enough volume that it shouldn't be a problem during rush hours. Just seems like a poorly thought out system.
The average drive thru time for Wendy's is bullshit. They'll make you park elsewhere or reverse to stop the drive thru timer. I see through your lies Wendy.
Been a decade since I worked there and different franchisees have different policies, but making customers park to wait for food was the biggest no-no when I worked there. If something went wrong and we had a hold-up at the drive-thru window, we would often run food back to the cashier window or send an employee outside with the food if they're between windows for the previous orders so we could keep the rest of the line moving, but making a customer park was considered timer-dodging and grounds for termination.