Decades after the drive-in movie theater's popularity has waned, the drive through restaurant window remains a fixture of modern suburbia. Even if we choose to enjoy our greasy burgers and fries on plastic molded chairs in the dining area of our favorite fast food establishment, the drive through window may be useful. When we're feeling especially peckish, we can go through the drive through lane and grab a snack to tide us over till we're parked.
While the drive-in movie is nearly a thing of the past, its remarkably low fidelity speaker system is still alive and well and is used to order meals as we look at professionally photographed food items, airbrushed to perfection to stimulate our taste buds. Clearly none of that advertising money went into the speaker system though, because a simple inquiry such as “Hold the vanilla?” can all too easily become “No salmonella?”
After placing an order, the driver's told the price and instructed to pull ahead to the pickup window. This is not the time for him to become a correct change hero or search the glove compartment for napkins from a previous visit. He should simply drive up to the window with an eye for any vehicles in front of him, because it's tricky to pass burgers and fries around the car once the airbags have been deployed.
If you're extremely famished, the drive-thru offers you the opportunity to buy several orders for your own consumption under the premise that it's for more than one person. As you're being handed several food items, you could say out loud “One for Betty, one for Gordo and one for me” to disguise the fact that you're the only customer involved with that order. If you want to make it more believable, you could try to get different combinations of condiments to further the illusion that there's more than one palette to satisfy.
If you're craving a more exotic item on the menu, such as a veal sandwich or broiled chicken breast, you may not want to order it from the drive through. If it's not a hot seller then chances are they don't have one on standby under the heat lamp and they'll have to make it from scratch. In this case, you'll probably be asked to pay for the meal and park nearby to wait for that item to be delivered to your car. If you were ordering Italian food from a motor home at this point, the experience would be remarkably like receiving delivery from a pizza place.
Some people pick up drive through in the hopes of saving time. This can work, but the driver should not be dining while he's driving. Even if he somehow managed to ingest a meal while operating a motor vehicle with no danger to anyone, there still could be the stigma of being spotted waiting at a red light with his knees on the steering wheel in the two and ten o'clock positions, holding a jumbo soft drink with a pound of ice in one hand and navigating steaming mounds of chili fries to his mouth with the other. You just don't see that sort of posturing in the TV commercials for European sports cars.
Sometimes you get as far as the next county before realizing that they didn't actually “hold the mayo.” If you were trying to save time, you probably wouldn't backtrack to set your order straight. However since the proliferation of mobile phones, you could have the option of calling the restaurant to voice your displeasure, but the fast food joint's caught onto this. This is why their phone number probably isn't printed on the receipt.
If you're a hungry pedestrian late at night, you may have stopped by a fast food joint only to find that the restaurant dining room is closed but the drive through is open. In this case, you probably have to be quite hungry to stand in line between a vintage Gremlin and a Hummer, walking a car length at a time until it's your turn to stand beside the window and take possession of your after hours sustenance.
There is a phenomenon from the drive-in movie era which hasn't survived the decades. That is the employment of servers on roller skates to take orders and serve food while rock and roll plays on the outdoor speakers of a drive-in restaurant. While we may long for the nostalgia a similar mode of operation would bring today, we should keep in mind the culture of today. Rather than a charming kid on roller skates serving food to classic rock and roll, we'd be more likely to be subjected to an individual leaping our hood on a skateboard as a rapper's bass drum stirred our coffee by vibration alone. Instead of a classic poodle skirt, the server would be more likely to wear low riding designer jeans and high riding jockey under shorts. This brings us back to one of the attractions of the drive through lane, and that is once you have your food you can make a quick getaway.
