Fast-food restaurants spend quite a bit of time studying the amount of time cars spend in their drive-through. Certainly, the faster the cars get through the drive-through, the more the opportunity for making money. QSR Magazine studied drive-through times for fast-food restaurants, and found Wendy’s had the best time, with a mean time a car spent in the drive-through equal to 138.5 seconds. Assume that drive-through times are normally distributed, with a standard deviation of 29 seconds.
Suppose that Wendy’s wants to institute a policy at its restaurants that it will not charge any patron that must wait more than a certain amount of time for an order. Management does not want to give away free meals to more than 1% of the patrons. What time would you recommend Wendy’s advertise as the maximum wait time before a free meal is awarded?