America Is Rediscovering the Drive-Through

But it turns out that we ended up liking some of the non-normal activities and have stuck with them. Most of us have a lot more Zoom meetings than we used to and may be opting for telehealth visits, even if we’ve happily retired all our masks and vowed to never wipe down our groceries again.

From an operations standpoint, this presents an intriguing question, explains Kellogg’s Sunil Chopra: “What new consumer behaviors were sticking and what wasn’t sticking?”

Chopra and colleagues set out to answer this question in the context of fast-food restaurants. Specifically, they wanted to know if the pandemic-era switch from in-store meals to drive-throughs was short-lived or long-lasting.

They find that, by a large margin, people are sticking with drive-through orders as opposed to sit-down meals at three major fast-food chains. And that change in preference is driving a huge amount of the post-COVID recovery at fast-food stores. Average monthly visits to stores with drive-throughs were only slightly down in December 2022 compared with December 2019. But in stores without drive-throughs, visits were down nearly 50 percent.

“The data is pretty stark,” says coauthor Ioannis Stamatopoulos, who got his PhD from Kellogg and is now at the University of Texas at Austin. “People really did change the way they go about getting fast food.”

And those changes have implications not only for fast-food companies but urban planners as well.

“On the one hand, the presence of drive-throughs can cause traffic congestion,” says Chopra, an operations professor at the Kellogg School. “But we’re also seeing that without a drive-through, some of these fast-food places will have a really difficult time surviving. I think these are things that planners should consider.”

Short vs. long trips

The researchers used data from 2018 to 2022 for more than 17,000 stores in three chains: McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks. Those stores make up roughly 10 percent of all fast-food stores in the U.S.

The data is based on cell-phone movement and is grouped into visits that lasted less than five minutes, between five and 20 minutes, 20 to 60 minutes, or more than an hour. The researchers categorized the visits as either short visits that lasted 20 minutes or less, or long visits that lasted more than 20 minutes.

When comparing patterns of short and long visits, they found clear differences between post-pandemic patterns at stores with and without drive-throughs. Long visits didn’t recover to 2019 levels at either type of store by 2022. Short visits, on the other hand, nearly recovered at stores with drive-throughs but not at those without them. And those short visits made a huge difference. While visits to stores with drive-throughs were only down by 4 percent post-pandemic, visits at non-drive-through stores were down 48 percent.

The researchers concluded that short visits were likely drive-through visits and not curbside pickups or delivery drivers. This was because curbside and delivery-driver pickups can happen at stores with or without drive-throughs, yet short visits only increased at stores with drive-throughs. The researchers also controlled for other variables, such as store location and neighborhood demographics, and found that these did not impact the overall findings.

To put these trends into perspective, the researchers calculated that the changes in customer behavior between drive-through and non-drive-through stores is analogous to 25 percent of all of Starbuck’s customers and half of its revenue moving from non-drive-through to drive-through stores.

“The magnitude of the change is really profound,” says coauthor Partha Mishra, a PhD student at Kellogg. “It really speaks to the stickiness of this change in behavior.”

And indeed, fast-food companies are already taking note and changing their strategies. For example, the researchers point to Chipotle, which is now including drive-throughs in most of the new stores it opens.

Why are people sticking with drive-throughs?

The stickiness of the behavior is clear, but the reasons why are less so. The researchers have a couple of untested hypotheses for the long-term move to drive-throughs.

One potentially relevant finding is that drive-through stores saw some recovery in their long visits while stores without drive-throughs did not. So it could be that people simply switched their preferred store to one with a drive-through for all their visits, Stamatopoulos says. “Part of the story could be that I started going to the store that has a drive-through and now that’s my store,” he says. “This has become my habit and there’s no reason for me to break the habit.”

Or it could be that people are consuming their fast food differently, he says. Before the pandemic, maybe the whole family came for a sit-down meal or treat. Now they’re happier picking it up and enjoying it at home.

Stamatopoulos hopes future research looks into the reasons behind these findings. “If we understand the particular mechanism at play here, we will be able to better predict how future changes will affect consumers.”

As it stands, the results have implications for urban planners and policymakers.

If companies start pushing for more drive-throughs, that will impact traffic patterns. And if non-drive-through stores, which are often in city centers, start closing at high rates, that could change the character of those neighborhoods.

The fast-food companies themselves are not oblivious to these shifts, the researchers say. In fact, they found a number of examples of fast-food-chain executives quoted in articles talking about a push for more drive-through stores, the need for more lanes of traffic for cars, or plans to reduce the size of dining areas.

“Other credible sources were making similar statements,” Stamatopoulos says. “But this is the scientific way of doing it—go out there and get all the data and painstakingly analyze it. It’s good that people’s intuition is aligned with what we find.”