[etempleton]

No doubt. I am not saying that McDoanlds is unsuccessful, rather that by customer satisfaction surveys In and Out wins. They also have, perhaps, a less scalable model of business and so can never grow to McDonalds size while also maintaining that quality.

Interestingly, Chick-fil-a has learned to scale and maintain quality.

[listenallyall]

This is just an opinion but CFA does not scale well. In my experience overall quality and service at CFA has dropped considerably, and not just at new stores, but older ones as well. Part of the issue is that CFA does not allow owners to own multiple stores, so every new store has a rookie on top. Well-trained, but not experienced.

Every INO is company-owned, overall I think it manages to keep quality pretty high at all it's stores. Of course part of that is due to the extremely limited menu, and also that INO has never been known for fast service. INO basically tells customers up front, we aren't convenient and we aren't fast and we don't sell anything except burgers... that's 3 areas of potential customer dissatisfaction that they take off the table. All that is left is price, which is good not great, and taste/quality, which, to its credit, INO is pretty fanatical about. Edit: and cleanliness/service, also strong points for INO