Ordering lunch is more stressful than public speaking for 1 in 4 Americans

You know the feeling.

You’re at the counter. The line behind you is growing. The menu has 47 items on it. The person waiting to take your order is being patient, but you can feel the clock ticking. You haven’t been here in a while, and you’re not sure what’s new. You don’t want to be that person.

Turns out, a lot of us are that person.

New research from Global Payments surveyed 2,000 Americans about what it actually feels like to order at a quick-service restaurant (QSR).

A few stats are worth pausing on:

• 29 percent of US consumers say it’s more stressful than public speaking.
• About 1 in 4 said it’s more stressful than a job interview.
• And 21 percent think it’s more stressful than going through airport security.

Let that sit for a second, especially considering we’re talking about ordering a burger. (Or a burrito bowl, or a coffee, or your other lunchtime favorite.)

The reasons aren’t hard to trace. Too many options, confusing menus, self-service kiosks that seem designed by someone who has never been hungry, and — my personal favorite — staff asking about add-ons when you’re already three decisions deep and a line is forming behind you.

Any one of those is manageable. But enduring all of them at once, with a line forming behind you, is a different experience entirely.

The research identifies these factors as commonly cited sources of ordering stress, and they show up consistently across thousands of respondents.

Not always. The ability to modify everything — swap the protein, add a sauce, hold the onions — sounds like a plus. But in practice, it can tip an already overwhelming experience into full cognitive shutdown.

Every additional question asked at the counter is another decision the customer has to make under pressure. But the problem isn’t the options themselves; in fact, bundles and customization are actually part of the solution. Bundles simplify the decisions and the research shows they’re the number-one driver of purchasing choices. Customization is something most people say they’d do more of if ordering felt easier. But the friction lies in being asked to navigate everything at once, on the spot, without much help.

It’s worth considering that the person on the other side of the counter is navigating the same chaos. They may be working within a system that wasn’t built to make either of your lives particularly easy (unlike Genius, which was built to bring every part of a QSR’s operations together in one connected platform).

When the menu is confusing, the modifications are complicated or the kiosk isn’t cooperating, that pressure lands on both sides of the counter. The best ordering experiences tend to be the ones where the technology is doing the heavy lifting so neither person has to.

Most of us have developed a very elegant solution to this problem of order anxiety: We choose the same thing every time. About 60 percent of US consumers say they have a go-to order they fall back on at QSRs.

When the menu feels overwhelming and the clock is running, defaulting to something familiar is the path of least resistance. It’s less “I really want the usual” and more “I really can’t deal with this right now.” (Which is a sentence I did not expect to write about lunch.)

Not exactly. Only 34 percent of Americans say they’re very confident they ordered what they actually wanted. Thirteen percent ate their meal and still felt like they’d missed something better. Ten percent said they outright regretted what they got.

So the ‘safe order’ solves the in-the-moment stress, but not the underlying problem. Most Americans are leaving something on the table — sometimes literally.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans have walked out of a quick-service restaurant without ordering at all, and not for the reason you might think. They were hungry, and the menu was right in front of them, but something about the experience felt rushed, unclear or uncomfortable.

That number may read as a quirky data point to some. But to me, it’s a design problem. These aren’t people who changed their minds. After all, they came in with every intention of ordering something. The question is whether the experience was built to meet them there.

Some of them are paying very close attention. There are operators who have hired agencies to physically track where customers’ eyes land on a menu board — think cameras, behavioral data, the works — and then redesigned the layout based on what they found. Most people walking up to the counter have no idea that level of research went into what they’re looking at.

The good news is that with digital menu boards now standard in many locations, that kind of iteration is faster and cheaper than it’s ever been. The experience is fixable. It’s just a question of whether it’s being treated as a priority.

For what it’s worth, I’m not immune to this either. My version of order anxiety hits when I’ve already made my decision but hear “Sorry, we’re out of that.” Suddenly I’m right back to square one, and like most people, I end up going with something random.

Even knowing everything I know about how this experience gets designed, the moment it breaks down, the reaction is the same. And that’s probably the most honest endorsement of this data I can give.

Want to see how your ordering habits stack up? The full data is here.