Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,37
absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe.”
Like fast-food portion sizes and most other runaway commercial lunacies, cupholder madness went maximally into the new American millennium. It’s now no longer surprising to see cupholders built into grocery carts, pool floats, camping gear, stadium seats, and movie-theater chairs. Not to mention strollers, desks, lawn mowers and industrial cleaners, go-karts and golf carts, poker and mah-jongg tables, couches and recliners. A minivan novelty, built in response to a burgeoning mobile dining habit, forever altered the auto industry, and America’s expectation of convenience and comfort. “The catchphrase in the auto-design community is McDonaldability,” read a dispatch from the 2004 Chicago Auto Show, “the ability of any vehicle to accommodate standard-size fast-food beverage cups and some of the extras that come with Happy Meals as well.”
By 2007, PricewaterhouseCoopers surveys had found that the number of cupholders had come to outstrip fuel efficiency as a priority for the American car buyer, though unprecedented hikes in gas prices in the late aughts would shuffle those priorities and hurt the sales of big cars. But by 2015, the mighty SUVs were booming again, along with a runaway number of cupholders. In late 2017, viral word of the features offered by a new-model Subaru SUV inspired euphoria and disbelief. The 2019 Ascent, pumped as “the biggest Subaru yet,” comes equipped with three passenger rows, 260 horsepower, and a staggering nineteen cupholders.
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The pathological speed of American life, which may or may not be bolstered by an economic fear of falling behind, seeped further into food culture as the twenty-first century took off. “In 2001, there were 134 food products that featured the word go on the label or in ads,” Tom Vanderbilt writes in his book Traffic. “By 2004, there were 504.” He adds that what the food industry calls “on-the-go eating occasions” in the United States and Europe were slated to rise from 73.2 billion in 2003 to 84.4 billion in 2008. As ends have become harder to meet and more workers take on multiple jobs at less conventional hours, traditional meals and mealtimes have come to mean less and less. In addition to a nation of snackers, many Americans have become odd-hours diners. Between 2002 and 2007, for example, the number of McDonald’s locations that operate twenty-four hours a day grew from 0.5 percent to 40 percent; meanwhile, a majority of franchises extended their core hours to accommodate very early mornings and very late nights.
According to industry estimates, the drive-thru window now generates 60 to 70 percent of all revenue at fast-food restaurants. These figures took hold in the late 1990s and have more or less remained steady ever since. These impersonal practices have created a gulf not just in the distance between Americans and their understanding of the food chain, but between citizens’ understanding of each other.
In December 2014, a week before Christmas, a woman named Nadine was passing through a Whataburger drive-thru for breakfast in the Texas suburb of Liberty, when Cheryl Semien, the store’s cashier, paid her a compliment on her coat. Nadine, otherwise unprompted, took off her $10,000 mink coat and passed it through the drive-thru window for Semien to keep. According to one fellow employee, Semien immediately commenced “yelling as if she won a million dollars.” As she sashayed before a news camera in her sweet new coat, Semien told local media of Nadine, “She was a perfect stranger, I didn’t know this lady from nowhere. I didn’t see her come through my drive-thru window as long as I’ve been at Whataburger for nine years.” As fate would have it, that December day was also Semien’s birthday.
The stories of the impulsive charity of fast-food patrons are part of a genre of viral heartwarming tales that frequently carom around the internet. In 2015, six months after Semien received PETA’s version of the Christmas massacre, 215 consecutive diners at a Chick-fil-A in Pooler, Georgia, picked up the tab for the customers after them in the drive-thru line in an epic pay-it-forward chain. That number was eclipsed a few months later when 250 straight drivers at a McDonald’s in Lakeland, Florida, followed suit. Observing this trend back in 2013, the journalist Kate Murphy reported, “Serial pay-it-forward incidents involving between 4 and 24 cars have been reported