Hungry (but not for human contact), Americans go to the drive-through
Faith Enokian loves a drive-through. The University of South Alabama senior loves them so much that she does one at least eight times a week.
Sometimes it’s just to pick up food. Other times, she asks an oft-bemused Starbucks barista to make “whatever your favorite drink is” places the interaction on TikTok.
“Maybe I’m lazy,” she said, “but it has something to do with the car.”
Getting a meal through a car window began to define the country’s food culture from the moment the founders of this company got a meal In-N-Out burger set up a two-way loudspeaker in 1948. But the drive-through has never been as integral to the way America eats as it is now.
The pandemic sent people into the comforting isolation of their cars to get tested for Covid, celebrate birthdays and even vote. And now it seems they don’t want to leave. At least to eat.
According to a report from foodservice research firm Technomic, drive-through traffic increased 30 percent between 2019 and 2022. Meanwhile, the number of people eating at fast-food restaurants fell 47 percent in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period in 2019. Drive-throughs now account for two-thirds of all fast-food purchases, according to a September report by Revenue management solutions.
As momentum builds, the $113 billion fast-food industry is leaning in. Popeyes executives are cutting the size of its dining rooms in half. Taco Bell is experimenting with eliminating them altogether in favor of more freeways. Chick-fil-A plans a two-story, four-lane transit next year in Atlanta, which can handle 75 cars at a time and deliver food from the kitchen onto a conveyor belt.
Restaurants tailor mobile menus to individual customers based on their previous purchases. Some are experimenting with artificial intelligence which can include in both orders Spanish or English, depending on the first words out of a guest’s mouth.
Why this new wave of drive-through love? Because the experience has become faster and smoother, industry executives say. The pandemic turbocharged upgrades that were already underway, including better mobile ordering, streamlined kitchens and smarter traffic management.
Others point to cultural shifts, such as the growing popularity of coffee shop drive-throughs among Gen Z and young millennials, and even pet ownership, which has skyrocketed during the pandemic.
“People don’t like to leave their pets at home,” says Diana Kelter, deputy director of consumer trends at Mintel, a global market intelligence agency. “And you can’t take your dog to Starbucks.”
But the most striking explanation may be a societal change: People emerged from the pandemic with less tolerance for interacting with strangers.
“These are all kinds of ways that people are prioritizing safety. The drive-through mentality keeps people safe both physically and psychologically,” said Shelley Balanko, a social scientist and senior vice president at the Hartman group, a research company that studies American eating patterns.
“Fellow buyers are dissatisfied. The staff are just as unhappy and difficult to deal with,” she said. “There are times when it’s just not worth it.”
Ronald Gross, a retiree with three grandchildren who lives in Brooklyn Park, just north of Minneapolis, sat in his car in a Taco Bell parking lot on a recent sunny afternoon, eating a melted chipotle chicken.
There was a Starbucks drive-through across the street. Behind him was a bank with two lanes for customers in cars. Next to it was an oil change station with a banner promising customers would never have to leave their cars again. And towering above them, trimmed in purple neon, was the futuristic two-story Taco Bell, where Mr. Gross bought his lunch.
The company opened it last year and called it Defy, an innovation that aims to redefine the drive-through for the digital age. There is no dining room. The kitchen is located on the second floor. Below, three of the four drive-through lanes are reserved for delivery people and people who order via an app. Bags of food zip from the kitchen to the customer on a circular tray slightly smaller than a manhole cover that moves up and down through a system of plastic pipes.
The technology didn’t seem that important to Mr. Gross. A moment for yourself in the car, yes.
Before the pandemic, he often went to restaurants like McDonald’s to eat. Now he sticks to the drive-through. “I’ve kicked the habit,” he said. “I think I’m like a lot of people who just don’t enjoy being social anymore.”
Even at Chick-fil-A and Dutch Bros, two chains where employees walk along the drive-through lines with tablets cheerfully taking orders as cars slide forward, the interaction is too much for humans.
“I do the drive-through so I can be anti-social. Are you forcing me to interact now? Caleb Edwards, a rapper, complained a TikTok video about Chick-fil-A. “No, brother. Let me drive through.”
Caitlin Campbell worked in the Starbucks drive-through as a college student in Tucson, Arizona. Customers often tried to include her in their lives, asking her to do things such as draw a heart on a drinking cup to cheer up a heartbroken passenger.
“You are an avatar for their special experience,” she said.
These days, she works from her home in Portland, Oregon, handling mergers and acquisitions for a software company, but she still goes to drive-throughs at Starbucks.
“I lean on that feeling of not wanting too much interaction,” she said. “Working from home for three years has seriously undermined my social skills.”
If nothing else, the fast-food industry has always known how to meet the mainstream right where it is, he said Adam Chandlera journalist who published “Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom” in 2019.
Although Jack in the Box let customers talk into a clown’s head to order in the 1950s, the ’70s saw the real beginnings of mass drive-through culture. Wendy has had it just opened the first one, and McDonald’s and Burger King soon followed. Americans embraced the idea as a convenient, family-friendly novelty.
In the 1980s, as middle-class wages plummeted and more and more families had two working parents, the drive-through offered a quick, cheap solution to dinner. In the 1990s, a race to the bottom emerged as fast food companies tried to offer the cheapest meal possible and some communities began reducing the use of drive-throughs as a way to combat obesity.
By the 2010s, the reaction had hardened. Different cities prohibited passing lanes for reasons of pedestrian safety, public health and reducing car emissions. Some accidents on the lanes were so common Law firms began to specialise in them.
But the drive-through has managed to remake itself and rise again. Although Minneapolis banned new drive-throughs in 2019, the law was signed legal challenges And complaints of people with disabilities. Companies like Starbucks and Biscuitville are becoming more creative and building smaller restaurants that cause less traffic disruption and fit better into neighborhoods.
In October, McDonald’s said in its quarterly figures that this was 40 percent of his sales came from customers who ordered digitally. It opened its first drive-through restaurant without a dining room in Fort Worth late last year.
Danny Klein, editor-in-chief of QSR magazine and author of the annual magazine Drive-Thru Reportcalls this “the era of drive-through optimization.”
The quality – and price – of drive-through food both increase as wait times shorten. “The drive-through is no longer a trade-off of just being fast and cheap,” Mr. Klein said. “Now it’s really about the technology. It’s about being accurate and providing a good experience.”
A generation that likes to customize orders on an app, expects speed and wants an experience for posting to TikTok is all in. Social media is full of videos exploring all kinds of drive-through culture, from random outbursts of violence to pranks like a car rigged to go through the line without a driver.
Eric Decker, the YouTube star who goes by the name Airrack, recently visited drive-throughs for 100 different restaurant brands. His search took him and some friends three days. The result 23 minutes video has almost 10 million views.
The Gen Z customer turned the drive-through experience on its head, said Scott Mezvinsky, Taco Bell’s North American president. “It’s a lesson in how to make something functional cool.”
Even fast casual restaurants that once eschewed drive-through culture and focused on urban customers willing to pay more for fresher, less processed ingredients, have jumped on the bandwagon.
Shake Shack, which started as a hot dog stand in a Manhattan park in 2001 and now has more than 500 restaurants around the world, opened its first drive-through in December 2021 in Maple Grove, Minnesota. Now it has 22. Sweetgreen, a company built on custom salads whose ethos includes being less carbon intensive, opened a Sweetlane in Schaumburg, Illinois, last year.
“The drive-through culture has really been one thing, and we’re happy to help make it something else,” said Nicholas Jammet, co-founder of the chain.
Numerous independent restaurant owners have opened drive-thru lanes to weather the pandemic. And some have had them all along.
“The drive-through culture is just part of the landscape here,” says the Los Angeles Times author and columnist Gustavo Arellano. “You learn to drive and eat at the same time. The trick is how to put the salsa on top, but you will find out.”
He has a particular fondness for the chili relleno burrito Lucy’s drive thru, but it’s about more than just the food, he said. A drive-through is a wonderful way to take some time for yourself.
“For less than two minutes, that person in the window has to focus on you and only you,” he said. “Then you grab your burrito and go on with your day.”
This experience is unlikely to lose its appeal.
“Despite the war on the combustible engine, we’re all stuck in cars and running out of time,” he said, “so all roads for Americans eventually lead to the drive-through.”
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