Is this actually a significant problem, if the cars’ emissions control systems are working properly?
You probably get exposed to far more noxious fumes from your neighbor cutting their grass than if you stood alongside a full drive thru.
If you eliminate the drive-thrus then you run into the next problem. You better have a parking lot big enough to corral all the cars of people constantly coming and going just to grab and go food orders. And you have to have an area inside to queue an ordering line and another area for people waiting for their food. I’d prefer to avoid that mess.
Good point. Maybe @Akaj should be praising drive-throughs, because without them, there would be a much longer line when he walks in to get his food.
Hmmm. I’m old enough to remember when drive-throughs were a Bold New Idea, but I don’t recall fast food joints having much bigger parking lots before they brought in the drive-throughs. I think now the cars just park in a line around the restaurant instead of in a grid next to the restaurant.
Yeah, giving parking limitations in many areas, I think there’s lots of places where park and walk in would cause significantly more problems than drive thrus ever would.
I think parking availability has decreased a lot in many areas since the time when fast food drive throughs were becoming common.
Parking is a wash. People doing take away, aren’t parked any longer or take up any more space than the cars lined up for drive-thru.
That isn’t accurate, it takes longer to park, get out, get back in, and drive away than to drive through a specifically designed thru-lane.
The Carl’s Jr I mentioned was in a cluster of offices that were in “too close for driving to be sane” range, even among those of us working there who drove to work in the first place. For example, my own workplace had at least 150 employees, and very few would go there because they basically would not serve anyone who wasn’t in the drive-through.
You sound like you approve of the McD’s manager telling a lobby full of walk-ins that they didn’t matter once they’d paid, so could wait unreasonable lengths of time for the meals they’d paid for. She did not want to allow employees to deal with orders THAT HAD BEEN PAID FOR.
To paraphrase someone up thread, I think it is fair to say the 30 seconds to walk to and from your car is basically a non-issue as far as parking availability is concerned.
I wouldn’t say I approved of it, but if a manager is told she will be judged based on drive thru speed and not on other things, it’s reasonable to expect that employee will respond to the incentives provided.
Not to an exhausted hungry customer who wants to get what the employees were quick to ring up, but not to serve.
In my neighborhood, this also hits an economic class issue. A lot of people in my neighborhood commute by bus because they cannot afford for every working person in the household to have a car to use to commute. There are also several apartment complexes in walking range where the income range tends low. Apparently, it’s also “reasonable” for those who can’t afford cars to drive through in to get second-class or worse service.
I don’t care much about drive-throughs one way or another, except when they become a nuisance.
There’s a main road not far from where I live. It has two lanes running in each direction, with a bunch of strip malls as well as some fast food outlets. There’s a McDonald’s, a Burger King, a Dunkin Donuts, and a Wendy’s, all within a half-mile stretch of the road. A Popeye’s has also just opened up.
At busy times, the drive-through “convenience” of these outlets constitutes both an inconvenience and a traffic hazard to road users in the area, because the lines get so long that they snake backwards all the way into the street. If you drive down there at the wrong time, there are people backed up in the right-hand lane on one side of the street, waiting to turn right into the property, and people backed up in the left-hand lane on the other side of the street waiting to turn left across traffic and get into line. This often happens with more than one restaurant at a time (Dunkin and McDonald’s seem to be worst offenders, either because they are more popular, or their properties are poorly designed), and effectively turns a busy two-lanes-each-way road into a choked one-lane-each-way road.
Businesses that cause this sort of traffic hazard should be subject to penalties.
If the restaurants are in so much demand, the problems you cite would happen with or without drive-throughs.
Not necessarily. It’s not just popularity; it’s a combination of popularity and the design of the parking lot and drive-through lanes. For example, at one of the places I was discussing, it only takes seven cars to join the drive-through lane before the next car has to wait in the street.
There’s an antiquated In-n-Out (the oldest one still operating, I think) in Pasadena, CA that effectively turns a block’s length of Foothill Blvd into a one-lane street.
When the service time is under 60 seconds, your time in walking is greater than the whole time they spend waiting.
I’ve worked for managers like that before. It’s frustrating, but we are judged on drive through time. If you don’t like it, call and complain to corporate. I’m not being flip here either, I’m serious, if you want the incentives to change, then you need to make the higher ups change the incentives. Managers in the store are pretty much powerless to implement any policy.
I was a manger, and I got written up for doing what made the most sense, rather than what my district manager told me to do. So, I handed them my keys and walked out. Didn’t change the policy though.
Other managers may not be so ready to quit their jobs over principle, so I don’t judge them for following the policy as dictated by their PTB.
It’s not just restaurants. There’s a bank on my way home that often has cars backed out into the main road in line for its ATM.
'Nother (potentially) interesting factoid about drive-thrus:
The question of how much of the drive-thru business is incremental (ie, business the restaurant would otherwise not have had) seems relevant.
It looks like adding a drive-thru may result in largely incremental business:
Davis says order times are staying below their [Panera’s] goal of five minutes and that double-digit sales increases are nearly all incremental.
[Firehouse Subs CEO, Don] Fox believes that in Firehouse’s case these sales are largely incremental.
There are also benefits beyond incremental sales: “Whenever you shift sales to takeout or drive-thru, you relieve some pressure on the lobby and interior queuing by easing the bottlenecks,” explains Fox. Takeout and drive-thru add to total capacity. “It’s a nice problem to have: When the dining room is full, customers can choose to take their meal to-go, rather than going somewhere else.”
I would also guess that the cost to deliver $X of food to a customer is (maybe more than a bit) lower (ie, drive-thru is more profitable than in-house dining) with a drive-thru model than in-house dining.
Less service, less clean-up, maybe a lower employee-to-transaction ratio (although, at some point, the line is too long and people will drive by rather than wait), maybe even a smaller footprint for a store as the % of gross sales fulfilled via drive-thru increases.
It’s interesting math/operations research stuff …
I’m amazed at people who wait on a 20-car line. It’s gonna be a hour.
I love drive-thrus, because it’s very convenient not getting out of the car, but after four or five cars in front either walk in, if not also full, or just go somewhere else.