Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,33
the “hot coffee lawsuit” had political ramifications, too. Not long after the trial, the case entered heavy rotation as well-funded publicity initiatives for tort reform made use, in ads, of its reputation as perhaps the most recognizable exemplar of lawsuit abuse.† For the remainder of her life and beyond, Liebeck would be linked to the epidemic of “jackpot justice” and the “lawsuit lottery.” In prominent op-eds and campaign stump speeches, she was cast as the demon personification of the lost American way, the embodiment of a country whose values had gone soft, mollycoddled, and unrecognizable.
* * *
Whether Stella Liebeck was truly entitled to payment from McDonald’s for a self-inflicted injury or not, her ordeal divines an entire early-1990s universe. That decade, with its inexplicable exuberance for Weird Al (guilty!) and Leno (not guilty!) and its disdain for litigiousness and assaults on big business, found America on familiar footing—loitering immaturely at the precipice of great opportunity. The old existential Cold War fears of nuclear doom were dissipating with the slow-motion breakup of the Soviet Union. The United States would soon rev toward unparalleled prosperity with frenzied, hypermobile gusto.
By 1990, the American workforce approached unprecedented gender parity with women comprising 47 percent, the result of a steady tick upward from 30 percent across the postwar decades. Though it had seemed revolutionary that about 25 percent of American women with children held jobs following World War II, by 1991 that figure had climbed to 66.8 percent. The continued rise of dual-income households and single-parent homes, along with the divorce rate (which peaked in the early 1980s), helped place convenience at the center of the universe. The nineties were peppered with awe-striking innovations like drive-thru banks and drive-thru dry cleaners and drive-thru photo-processing centers. Fledgling drive-thru businesses came to run the commercial gamut from the practical (pharmacies) to the brilliant and perhaps ill-conceived (liquor stores) to the downright spiritual (chapels). “The working person doesn’t have time to come in,” the owner of a camera-operated, Chicago-area drive-thru funeral home told The New York Times in 1989. “They want to see the body but they don’t want to have to wait. I always thought there should be some way they could see the body anytime they want.”
The most enduring and widely embraced of these businesses were drive-thru restaurants, which already had cars and the impatient national condition etched into their DNA. Red’s Giant Hamburg, a now-defunct Route 66 burger joint in Missouri that opened in 1947, is credited by some with being the first drive-thru in the world. Others suggest the title belongs to Kirby’s Pig Stand, a barbecue chain also considered to be the country’s first drive-in restaurant. When it opened in 1948, In-N-Out Burger used what it claims was the first two-way speaker in fast food, which is how the drive-thru experience is mostly still conducted today. A few years later, in 1951, Jack in the Box married the McDonald brothers’ carhop-free, drive-in model and In-N-Out’s limited menu concept and opened as a drive-thru-only operation in San Diego, using a speaker box with a menu board on it a few car lengths behind the pickup window. Jack in the Box’s influential drive-thru concept was pilfered with literal fidelity by the iconic California chain Der Wienerschnitzel, which solved concerns about its limited real estate by fashioning a car-sized hole in the middle of restaurants for customers to physically drive through to receive their food.
By the late 1960s, drive-in restaurants had mostly fallen out of favor. Some chains (especially away from car-besotted California) started betting big on indoor seating and dining rooms. However, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas understood that the light at the end of the competitive tunnel was a headlight. “I thought, ‘Where is all this business going from the drive-in [restaurant] business? The drive-in used to be real popular, and there are more cars on the road but there are less drive-ins.’” After paring down the menu at Wendy’s, Thomas found success with a speedy drive-thru window; bigger franchisors such as Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken quickly followed suit with their own.
And so, the drive-thru window, which went mainstream as a bonus amenity in the 1970s, eventually morphed into a necessity for the increasingly frantic way of life in which dining out became a deed born of circumstance more than just luxury. By the late 1980s, nearly 90 percent of Americans were eating at restaurants at least once a week, with 40 percent of them dining out daily. The rapid shift away from