At a public hearing over Zoom in March, the Santa Barbara, Calif., City Council discussed what many say is a problem growing so troublesome it needs to be removed: A Chick-fil-A drive-thru.
The restaurant is located on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. And when it gets busy, traffic from the fast-food chicken chain can back up into the street, effectively closing one of the lanes and forcing pedestrians and bicyclists as well as cars to navigate what many say is a dangerous situation. And it was enough to warrant a recommendation from city staff that it be declared a public nuisance—which would enable the city to close the lane.
“It’s not just any old street,” Derrick Bailey, Santa Barbara’s traffic engineer, said during the public hearing, referring to the location of the Chick-fil-A. “State Street is one of the most important streets for moving people and goods. Its purpose is to have the highest levels of mobility. State Street was never intended to function with significant blockage.”
The council ultimately gave Chick-fil-A until June to come up with a solution to the problem. Yet it illustrates a growing issue around the country: As demand for drive-thru restaurant food has soared the past couple of years, so have conflicts between the restaurants and their communities.
Local reports reveal dozens of such issues across the country affecting numerous brands, from a Raising Cane’s in Charlottesville, Va., that has caught the attention of public officials to a popular local drive-in in Pullman, Wash. McDonald’s, Starbucks and other chains have allegedly caused enough traffic problems to warrant attention by local governments.
But Chick-fil-A appears to have some of the most significant problems. Lawsuits have been filed over at least two of the locations, one in Ohio and another in New Jersey, by neighboring businesses and property owners angry over unexpected backups at the restaurants’ drive-thrus. The chain has had conflicts in South Carolina, Florida and other states.
The conflicts come as drive-thrus themselves have never been more popular among restaurant chains. More concepts, and more types of concepts, are building drive-thrus than ever before, sending valuations for such sites soaring. With customers continuing to line up at those lanes, it promises the potential for more such conflicts in the future.
Growing regulations
Demand for drive-thrus among customers has been growing long before the pandemic, as an increasingly busy consumer shifted more of their spending to convenience-oriented food. Few things are more convenient than not having to get out of your car. Before the pandemic, for instance, the typical McDonald’s generated 70% of its sales inside those lanes.
Some cities around the country are putting tough limits on drive-thru locations. Santa Barbara, the city considering the Chick-fil-A nuisance, will no longer approve new drive-thrus, making the three it does have particularly valuable. A number of other cities around the country have approved similar ordinances, most notably Minneapolis, which stopped approving them in 2019.
Much of the concern revolves around their impact on traffic. Critics say they lead to more accidents, with other cars, bicyclists and even pedestrians. “The business model is to place them on arterial roads where there’s the most traffic,” said Eric Dumbaugh, a professor with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. “But that’s also where communities need the most mobility.
“There are real concerns about allowing traffic to back up on these roads. It’s a major thing they’re dealing with.”
Critics also argue that fast-food restaurants often target low-income areas with what they say is cheap, unhealthy food. And they say that drive-thrus contribute to other problems, such as low air quality.
Yet local pushback also runs counter to demand. Many communities simply do not like drive-thrus because of what they say it represents—the growth in fast-food chains. Yet consumers really do like them. Quite a bit.
“Sometimes (concern about drive-thrus) is grounded in reality. There may not be enough storage for queues that form,” Dumbaugh said. “Other times, it seems like there’s a bias against them. Drive-thru restaurants are looked down upon as not as desirable as other uses.”
The pandemic changes things
The rapid shift in restaurant demand to the drive-thru caught a lot of operators off guard.
The A&W restaurant in Baldwin, Wisc., just off Interstate 94, 30 miles east of St. Paul, was not built for drive-thru. It was initially a drive-in restaurant. And even when it switched in the late 1980s, customers still preferred to come inside the restaurant to enjoy a frosty mug of root beer. About 35% of the restaurant’s pre-pandemic sales came through the drive-thru.
The pandemic hit in March 2020 and changed that. Drive-thru sales went to 90%. As a result, customers waiting in line often backed out into the street, especially when the restaurant would run a fish fry popular with locals. “It’s been the hardest two years of my career,” Anthony Walker, the restaurant’s owner, said in an interview.
Walker decided to change the configuration of the drive-thru to improve throughput and eliminate those backups. He moved the order point to fit more cars between that and the window and added a second drive-thru lane. The restaurant remained open during construction, and when workers poured concrete, employees spent two days taking customers’ orders from a deer stand.
“Adding a double lane, it was a blessing,” Walker said. “But it was quite an undertaking to reinvent the wheel on how we’d done drive-thru business in the past. We were basically tripling sales in the drive-thru. But there was a big learning curve.”
When the pandemic hit, drive-thrus were allowed to remain open to serve first responders and other “essential” workers. But when stimulus payments came in, customers flocked to them. Sales soared, helping chains like McDonald’s quickly recover from the pandemic. Drive-thru demand remains well above where it was before the pandemic and is widely expected to remain at some elevated level.
Many restaurants were not built for this type of business. Wienerschnitzel, the California-based hot dog chain, went from 65% drive-thru to more than 90% now. Most of its dining rooms still aren’t open.
JR Galardi, the chain’s CEO, said traffic frequently backs up into streets at some of its older locations—sometimes requiring police to come direct traffic. “Our smaller restaurants were built so long ago,” he said. “They were built for $600,000-$700,000 volumes,” he said. “Now they’re averaging $1.2 million-$1.4 million. That causes all kinds of problems.”
But maybe no chain has seen its volumes take off quite like Chick-fil-a.
“These are unusual times for all of us,.” -Travis Collins.
Soaring volumes, more conflict
The Atlanta-based chicken chain has undergone tremendous growth over the past two decades, growth that seems almost unstoppable. Total average unit volumes for the chain exceed $5.9 million, according to Technomic. But a stand-alone location with a drive-thru averages more than $7 million.
Those volumes have doubled over the past decade. While a lot of that is clearly coming from higher prices, that still means the average Chick-fil-A is serving a lot more customers than it did a decade ago.
As a result, Chick-fil-A has worked furiously to handle drive-thru volumes at its restaurants. Locations often have multiple drive-thru lanes and stations for workers to take orders and even special doors for them to come in and out of the restaurant to bring food to cars.
Complaints about the Santa Barbara location emerged well before the pandemic. The city began working with the location in 2019 on fixing traffic problems there. But traffic in the drive-thru took off since the pandemic.
Travis Collins, who became the local owner-operator of the Chick-fil-A that year, said traffic in the location’s drive-thru doubled after the pandemic. He also noted that hiring challenges because of COVID and a labor shortage also slowed service. “These are unusual times for all of us,” he said at the public hearing, arguing that it’s unfair to judge the restaurant based on the past two years.
The company’s response to the challenge has also revealed some of the chain’s efforts to handle busy drive-thrus. Collins said there is usually an employee directing traffic. Anywhere from seven to as many as 15 workers are then outside, walking with customers, taking orders and bringing out food. The location has added additional kitchen equipment.
Corporate experts are also working with the restaurant to get customers through more quickly. “Our business is a game of seconds,” Collins said.
The company also proposed three different solutions for the property to address the backups. The first one involved the drive-thru line wrapping around the building, something the company prefers and uses for all its new locations, as it doubles the queue onsite. City planners rejected the plan. Subsequent ideas were rejected as inadequate.
“We sincerely regret that this traffic situation has come to this point,” Collins said. “We wish to work in good faith with the city to resolve this situation once and for all.”
“People love drive-thrus. COVID kicked that to a new level. But what is the right type of drive-thru that meets the community where it wants to be?” -Aaron Noveshen.
The drive-thru future
The Chick-fil-A won more time to fix the problem. But more companies are pushing to build more drive-thrus, or things that look like drive-thrus, than ever before. Chipotle Mexican Grill is building mobile-order drive-thrus wherever it can. Shake Shack recently opened its first drive-thru in a suburb of Minneapolis. Sweetgreen is opening drive-thrus.
Starbucks, long known for its urban locations, now has plenty of conflicts of its own at its growing roster of drive-thru units.
At the same time, not a single operator likes having a long queue in their drive-thrus—regardless of any traffic impact. Customers will leave when they see a long line. But with demand increasing for these lanes, companies have unleashed more innovation in their drive-thru lanes in the past two years than in the previous 50.
Companies are experimenting with multiple drive-thru lanes, including conveyor belts that take food to outer lanes. They’re testing artificial intelligence, mobile-order lanes and other strategies. Taco Bell is set to open a four-lane drive-thru in suburban Minneapolis. KFC is portraying its new curbside service as an alternative to the drive-thru, hoping to get customers to avoid the queue altogether.
Some operators had little choice. One of Walker’s goals with his drive-thru redesign was to get customers to order sooner, so more of their time in line is spent between the time they order and they get their food.
“You need to have customers’ order on the screen in the kitchen,” he said. “If you’re waiting in line, but your order is not on the screen, you’re just waiting in line for nothing.”
Aaron Noveshen founded the 12-unit Starbird Chicken six years ago recognizing the potential for growing conflict between communities and drive-thrus. “It was becoming more and more difficult to get approvals for drive-thrus in California,” he said. “One of our strategies early on was to think about why the drive-thru wasn’t working today, and also apply what the solution is for the future.”
The company has none of them, instead using mobile order apps, curbside pickup, self-order kiosks and other strategies to greatly improve convenience. The result: 80% of the chain’s sales come through digital orders, among the industry’s highest rates of digital penetration. Noveshen believes that effective use of technology not only works better with local communities but is better economically—his restaurants need less land and thus have a lower initial investment.
“People love drive-thrus,” Noveshen said. “COVID kicked that to a new level. But what is the right type of drive-thru that meets the community where it wants to be?”
Many of these strategies are being implemented across the industry. But it’s worth noting that Chick-fil-A is as good as any other brand at moving people through its drive-thrus and it still has challenges.
The key long-term for any brand with a drive-thru is to make sure there is enough space on site for cars to wait in line. “The main thing here,” Dumbaugh said, “If you’re going to have a drive-thru, you have to provide adequate storage for it.”