By Ali Francis

That's all, 2022. From the good (most popular recipes!) to the bad (least favorite food trends!), we're spending December looking back. DRIVETHRUCITY

The mood at Taco Bell’s futuristic new drive-through concept: industrial bleak. The monster Taco Bell Defy restaurant, which opened in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, this past summer, looms across four lanes like a highway toll checkpoint. An enormous digital menu board advertises neon Crunchwraps and Mexican Pizzas. Combo deals are prepared within minutes in the floating restaurant and lowered to drivers via high-tech food elevators painted a violent shade of purple. You never have to speak to a fellow human.
As traditional restaurants struggled with capacity limits during the pandemic, drive-through orders boomed by a staggering 20%. At the height of the shutdown, 90% of quick-service restaurant orders were placed through car windows, according to a report published in July. It would be easy to chalk the whole thing up to social distancing, but even now, when restaurants are largely able to operate as normal, 75% of profits at these restaurants are coming from drive-throughs. DRIVETHRUCITY

As Americans move to the suburbs from cities and labor shortages fuel in-store automation, we can expect fast food to get even faster and more car-centric. Welcome to the future of fast food: dunking fries while blasting Lana Del Ray in your Prius.

The taco kings are hardly the only ones investing in speedier drive-throughs. A new McDonald’s in Fort Worth, Texas, uses video technology in its order-ahead lane to let staff know when your car creeps close to the pickup window, which spits out food and drinks on a conveyor belt like a Pez candy dispenser. Starbucks, which has long plugged itself as the all-important third place for people to commune, has instead embraced isolation: The drive-through at the stark, recently-opened location near my house in Rockaway Beach, Queens, seems to be both out of place and… frequently packed with cars. DRIVETHRUCITY

Fast-casual chains, which have worked hard to position themselves as “not fast food,” are also landing in the express lane. Burger giant Shake Shack opened its first drive-through in late 2021. Last year, about 80% of Chipotle’s 215 newly built locations featured a Chipotlane—and they’re averaging about 15% higher sales than stores without a drive-through. Sweetgreen, a brand built on selling overpriced, farm-to-table salads to millennial office workers, finally gave in to the suburban siren song, opening its first drive-through location in Schaumburg, Illinois this past November. If you’re a fan of taco salads but don’t like to get out of your car, this all means that you’re in luck.

Drive-throughs have always been cash cows for American restaurants. But a confluence of factors fueled their recent explosion: As offices emptied out during the pandemic peak, swaths of people bought cars and fled cities for suburban pastures. Lockdown dragged on and these patterns eventually became more permanent. Cities continued to experience downward economic activity as people left—less Amex cards swiping for salads and burrito bowls—while some regional areas benefited from an influx of new customers. Fast food companies were really just meeting the people where they’d gone. DRIVETHRUCITY

Overworked and underpaid fast food employees also fled the industry in droves during the pandemic, creating a labor shortage that motivated fast food companies to lean hard into automation. By November 2021, unemployment fell to 7% while open food service jobs grew to about 120,000. By this July, the industry was down 750,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of its workforce. One way stores have coped with the mounting vacancies is to fill them with technology: The national burger chain Checkers and Rally’s is testing artificially-intelligent voice assistants to help with customer service, McDonald’s and Taco Bell have rolled out self-ordering kiosks, and a robot called Flippy currently operates the fry station at some White Castle stores. High tech drive-throughs are a natural extension. DRIVETHRUCITY

There’s something else going on, too: For a range of reasons, our social lives have been wilting for decades. Between 2003 and 2021, time spent alone has steadily increased from 43.5% to 50.5% for the average American. It’s even more stark when you discount the people who live in your own house: In the same 18-year period, time spent with people we don’t cohabitate with plunged from 21.9% to 14.1%. Love it or hate it, the ever-more prolific fast food drive-through reflects the reality that we’re just not hanging out as much anymore.

Then again, most fast food restaurants have never really been bastions of community or idyllic places to gather. Maybe it’s more fun to smash crispy-salty food alone in the car with music blasting, instead of hunched over on a hard plastic chair under the aggressively fluorescent lights of your local fast food restaurant. Now, in the instances we are hanging out, it’s in restaurants more intentionally designed for lingering, or at home on the couch with friends and a bag of takeout. DRIVETHRUCITY

When you take into account the urban exodus, pandemic labor shortages, and an increase in solo time, it makes sense that the drive-through is thriving right now. Whether the concept seeps beyond fast food remains to be seen. But for the foreseeable future? Catch you in the parking lot—avoiding eye contact and eating our limp little nuggets in the car.

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