It’s clearly not simple conveyor belts. Look at the picture. There are big boxes the food goes into that have to be pushed out and then back. And then multiply that by the number of cars and you’ve got something that’s going to add too much maintenance costs onto a low margin restaurant.
It’s clearly not simple conveyor belts. Look at the picture. There are big boxes the food goes into that have to be pushed out and then back.
Yes, there’s one box attached to the conveyor that goes back and forth, and a second , larger box at the carport that has some degree of motion, adjustable by the consumer. The situation is explained in more detail in the article link I posted.
My point stands that there weren’t a lot of complex parts involved there. There was a motor for each unit inside the restaurant which probably received the greatest wear & tear, which wasn’t all that much, considering. Compare that to motors powering assembly line conveyor belts, and even at full capacity, these were operating a few minutes per hour. So, pretty light work.
And then multiply that by the number of cars and you’ve got something that’s going to add too much maintenance costs onto a low margin restaurant.
The whole point of the restaurant was to lower costs all around, not unlike robots & AI replacing labor, and evidently they were successful. The place did great business upon opening and went on for several years. From the article, it seems to be implied that consumers simply got tired of the gimmick after a few years, perhaps preferring the human touch. It did not mention maintenance issues nor associated costs.
Maybe I have my European biases, but it's amazing to me that the absurdity of eating restaurant food in your car rather than around a table is not striking to everyone.
Of course, in the late 40s this would be a fun gimmick - what is really absurd is that the concept of eating in your car seems to somehow have become normalized somewhere along the way. Again, seen with European eyes - of all cultural differences, there are others I struggle more with.
Oh, I don’t disagree! I absolutely hate eating in the car and would rather eat at someone’s home or a comfortable restaurant. I think many folks in the US would agree, but there are also many who do it to save time because we’ve allowed our infrastructure to be completely anti-mass transit friendly in the vast majority of the country.
It was a combination of eating in the car or getting it and taking it to one of our many parks that had picnic tables.
As a kid in the 70s/80s we regularly picked something up at the drive through and took it to a nearby city park when in town. On road trips we would pick it up and stop at one of the many roadside parks on the way to wherever we were going. No rating in the car because that was messy, even though I know other people did.
Also convenient to pick up on the way home once both parents were working and there wasn't time available to cook a full dinner many evenings, what with sports and other youth activities.
Yes, people ate in their cars too. But a lot of the popularity of druve throughs comes from being able to rush to the next thing with our overworked culture.
Your European bias is due to size and scale differences. In the post war period, America took the idea of the German Autobahn and ran with it in spades. The US has always been absolutely massive, and the Interstate Highway project allowed expansion on that same scale. It is not uncommon for people to live and hour or more away from work, and/or outside of “town”. This applies to both rural towns and city suburbs. Add to this the lack of mass transit, and it means that our car culture developed as an extension of the person, and of the home. The phrase “I live in/out of my car” is common here, and I’m talking about people that have an actual place to live. Just think in terms of spending 2-4 hours in your car each day, and it doesn’t sound so weird.
The same thing happens in Europe and Asia where there is long distance mass transit, the only difference is where it takes place. If you or your whole family are going to be on a train for 2 hours (or more), no one is going to blink an eye at taking a snack or meal on the train. They even serve meals. Cars don’t have a snack trolly or meal service, so the drive through and drive in became our version.
The old adage “a hundred years is old in the US, and 100 miles is a long distance in Europe” is the most appropriate lens to look at it.
It's certainly an element to it, combined with a lack of leisure time resulting from longer working hours and weaker unions. The power of the automobile industry in infrastructure design certainly didn't help either.
Still, the way we eat is so deeply ingrained in culture that I can't help but feel it goes deeper than this. People will not eat in their cars in Turin even though it's very much a car city. I'm from up north in Scandinavia where distances are greater (though more in time than in distance, as we travel on small winding roads rather than highways), and eating in the car still seems somewhat unheard of there.
Not that you're wrong - I think there's a profound change in culture that has taken place, but I agree the distances in the US would certainly be one of the mechanisms behind it.
I'm curious if people eat in their cars in Latin America now.
It’s not meant in a bad way. It’s just the concept is pretty funny IMO, and it’s crazy USA did this in 1949, when many countries, even countries that weren’t poor, were still rationing after WW2. My father was a child back then, and only 2 people in the small town he lived in had cars, and this is Denmark, we were not a poor country.
The US didn't have it's manufacturing plants bombed to ruble, in fact the US's manufacturing capacity grew enormously during the war, and it then suddenly had no war to supply so it could all suddenly be put toward building other things. This is one of the reasons why the US economy grew so much after the war.
The primary difference is what it’s all about. You can ignore similarities with other restaurants like there’s food involved and such. The fact they are sitting in their cars is the point.
I’m surprised there isn’t something like this being done now in the Bay Area as a “revolutionary, employee-free, AI-powered robotic dining adventure”. Of course the screen would still flip around to show:
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