I haven’t owned a car in 17 years.
Sometimes I really miss it, and other times I feel like I am a better friend of the Earth than that private-plane-taking eco-warrior Leonardo DiCaprio.
But last month I visited the US, and got to drive for the first time in nearly two years. Not only was I driving, I was going to the drive-thru again – from coffee at Dunkin’ to Happy Meals at McDonald’s and blizzards at Dairy Queen.
And that got me thinking…
Where did the drive-thru begin?
Though they weren’t the first to use it, it’s probably no surprise that we can credit McDonald’s with making the drive-thru what it is today.
And it all began as a creative way to solve a problem…
In 1974, David Rich had a problem.
Rich owned a McDonald’s franchise in Sierra Vista, Arizona. It had a great location – just two miles away from military base Fort Huachuca – and the soldiers were some of his best customers.
But his sales were declining.
He learned that the soldiers had received a standing order forbidding them from wearing their fatigues in public. That meant they couldn’t come inside to grab a burger on their way to and from work at the base.
Rich needed to find a way to serve these customers.
He heard about another McDonald’s franchisee who was about to build the company’s first drive-thru. It was going to be a garden-themed, four-column portico attached to a restaurant in Oklahoma City.
It would have McDonald’s characters, including a full-size Ronald McDonald statue that would take orders through a speaker and microphone.
But Rich didn’t have time to build a portico.
So instead, he pushed out a small portion of the wall, and created just enough space for an attendant. He installed a small sliding window, and on January 24, 1975, he opened McDonald’s first drive-thru.
Business boomed as soldiers were now able to stop at McDonald’s and get their hamburgers without breaking the military’s rules.
The drive-thru concept was quickly picked-up by many other franchisees – with impressive results. One franchisee saw sales increase 40 percent in just two months.
By 1979, over half of the nearly 5000 McDonald’s restaurants in the US had a drive-thru. And six years later, the first McDonald’s drive-thru in Europe was opened in Dublin, Ireland. The first McDonald’s in the UK opened a year later, in Manchester.
Though McDonald’s made the drive-thru concept popular across the US, the idea did not originate with them.
Sheldon ‘Red’ Chaney was widely credited with the first drive-thru in 1947 at Red’s Giant Hamburg in Missouri, and In-N-Out restaurants were using a drive-thru with a simple intercom system back in 1948.
McDonald's has continued to improve the drive-thru service that began in 1975, and reports that 70 percent of their US sales now come from the drive-thru orders.
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Keep Smiling - and Stay Curious!
-Beth