Are there any drive-thru supermarkets?

Factual Questions
1

I had an interesting idea. Say a supermarket had a drive-thru window. You could pull up to the window, request an item, and one of the employees would fetch it for you. But it wouldn’t be free. It would cost maybe 50¢ extra to get it from the drive-thru window. This would be ideal for people who were going to the store just to get one thing, like toothpaste, toilet paper, a box of cereal, or whatever, and really didn’t feel like parking the car. You could order multiple things at the drive thru but the price would keep going up with everything you ordered, maybe by exponents or something. (Not just 50¢ per item.)

Could they make a profit this way? From people who just want one thing and don’t want to park? Or would the cost be offset by the number of people who would have otherwise walked into the store to get their one item, and then be motivated to buy more stuff impulsively, who would have never walked into the store if there was a drive-thru window?

Is there any way to make a drive-thru window at a supermarket profitable?

ETA: let me clarify, I am not talking about a drive-thru only store. I’m talking about adding a window to an already-existing conventional supermarket.

2

Given that there are ten of thousands of items in a grocery store, I can’t see this working. Oh, you want toilet paper. Do you want Charmin, Cottonelle, Angel Soft, Quilted Northern Super, Green Forest, Scott, Kleenex, Soft n Gentle…ok, do you want that in a 2 pack, 4 pack, 8 pack, 16 pack. Yes the 8 pack is buy 2 get one free. You can read it on the board right there, the toilet paper is right under the paper towel section. Yes, I know it is in size 2 font but it is hard to fit everything onto a billboard you know.

Logistical nightmare. Works okay at McD’s where they only have 30 or so items. Works at a bank where the only item involved is money (paper or electronic). But for a grocery store, I don’t think it could work.

3

It’s not quite what you’re looking for but there are vending machines the size of small shopsthat could stock a huge amount of what the supermarkets do and could be placed to be “drive-thru”.

4

Maybe there would be some system where you have to know exactly what you want; there are U-Scan checkout things with a touch-screen where you can look up any item in the store, so maybe the drive-thru would have a similar deal where you would have to look up and enter in what you want before anyone would come to the window. I’m not sure. There has to be some way of making this work.

5

Why yes, yes there are.

Err, make that “were.”

6

A drive thru grocery window would sure be handy. It would need to be kept as an extremely express lane (say, 1 or 2 items), though, or otherwise the lines of cars could get quite long. People definitely abuse the express lanes inside the stores already (I was behind someone with about 100 items in his cart in the express lane the other day, I went to another register because I wasn’t in the mood for a confrontation).

7

Back when I worked at SuperValu headquarters, we had several stores that we trying something like this.

They had a drive-up window on the back side of the store, but you had to phone in an order in advance, then come to pick it up a few hours later.

Different stores were trying various options on this. Most charged a service fee, though some waived it for orders larger than a certain amount. Some had a minimum amount on the order. Most asked for at least a 2-hour lead time – call at your afternoon coffee break, and it will be ready to pick up on the way home. Some stores didn’t allow frozen foods (because they didn’t have a good place to store them at the drive-in window). Some stores were hesitant about produce orders, because people are so fussy & so different in picking out produce.

Some stores didn’t think much of the idea, because the customer didn’t come into the store. (Impulse buys from in-store displays are a big part of the grocery business, and they don’t work unless the customer comes inside.) Some tried having the order-taker try to push the special sale items, but there are usually too many in a grocery store, and the customers were often in a hurry, and didn’t like this ‘tele-marketing’.

Some stores tried this without the drive-up window: you phoned the order in, they picked it, and had it in a box inside the store. The store liked this better because the customer came inside; the customers liked it less because it wasn’t as quick as a drive-up window.

Some stores felt this was costing them sales: had the customer come inside to get bread & milk, they would have picked up other items. But other stores said the customers would have just gone to a Quicky-Mart/ 7-11 type store instead, so they were gaining business on the whole.

As I recall, it was being tried, but was not a hot new thing that all the stores were jumping on. It was hard to get any accurate figures to show what it was doing in sales, and the startup costs, plus the cost of having a clerk pick the orders, was somewhat high. Some stores thought they were losing money at it, but gaining customer satisfaction. It seems to have died out at grocery stores around here. Though there is still a home delivery grocery business operating, but they charge delivery fees, and the groceries are priced higher, and selection is smaller. But well-oof, busy people still buy from it.

8

Back when I was a kid in Ohio, we had drive-through convenience stores that primarily existed for the sale of beer (in cases or six-packs, not loose), but you could maybe get chips or sodas, too. It was just a shed that had all the inventory stacked up, and you drove into the shed, told the guy, he got it off the shelf and you handed over the dough. I can’t imagine they still exist, but maybe if samclem, who lives in my old hometown, wanders in here, he can let us know.

–Cliffy

9

There are a half-dozen or so drive thru’s in this area. Imagine a drive Thru 7-11 or something. Not super market size, but they have the basics, especially BEER! They are quite popular, but I don’t see them in a lot of places. Guess we’re fortunate.

10

I remember being astonished about 40 years ago, visiting friends in the Devils Lake, ND area, to see that liquor stores had drive-up windows on the side. They claimed it was because of the nearby indian reservations, but most of the customers I saw weren’t indian.

Seemed to me like an almost automatic DUI invitation. But I guess that growing up in western Minnesota, where most of our county was still ‘dry’, with no liquor sales at all, affected what I saw as normal.

11

There is a marke in my neighborhood in DC that the entire store is behind bulletproof glass. You tell them what you want and have a conversation like the one you imagined for toilet paper and pass your money through a window. Your goods are then passed through a turnstile.

12

There’s a convenience store down the street from my house (in San Jose) that’s been doing this for years. It has been the “oh shit we don’t have any milk” destination for just as long.

13

They definitely still have these in Ohio (I live in northern Summit county). Off the top of my head I can think of ones in Cuyahoga Falls, Kent and Munroe Falls. Also, most of the new Circle K gas stations have drive-thrus, and if you’ve been in a new Circle K they are basically convenience stores.

14

Also in the Pittsburgh area.

15

It’s not entirely clear to me why booze received via drive-up will be consumed in the car while booze bought inside the store and carried to the car will not be.

I can see the argument that it makes it somewhat easier for someone who’s already inebriated to buy more.

16

The Dairy Barn chain on Long Island (they may also be elsewhere for all I know) does this. As mentioned earlier, just a sort of a drive thru 7/11 type thing.

17

Louisiana has a chain of drive-through daiquiri shops. They’re served with a sticker over the straw hole so that the store is in compliance with open-container laws when it hands it over. The driver is given a straw on the side, and the assuption is that no driver ever peels off the sticker, puts the straw in, and starts sipping until back at home.

18

Even that is overkill. No one would ever consider drinking to excess at all let alone driving like that in Louisiana.

19

OKAM Quick & Easy
638 S Martin Luther King Drive
Springfield, IL 62703

Calling it a “grocery store” is a bit of a stretch, but if one is in the Springfield ghetto and needing some chips, smokes, beer, soda, etc., swing by and Ali will hook you up without you ever having to get out of the car.