Fast food restaurants are dropping the 'restaurant' part.
, two drive-thru chains that were early to this idea. Take Salad And Go, the nine-year-old budget salad chain that now has dozens of locations in Arizona and Texas. Salad And Go has no inside at all, nor does it usually bother with picnic benches or even parking spots, like Sonic. Founder Roushan Christofellis has said the stores’ “
” are the secret to their super-affordable salads. As a bonus, no public interior space means you don’t need to build customer parking.Wherever Americans are eating, it isn’t inside fast-food joints. To meet this shift, some chains, like Wendy’s and Qdoba, have embraced “,” unmapped, closed-door facilities where food for delivery might be prepared for a dozen different brands at once.
Increasingly, the logic behind ghost kitchens is finding its way into public-facing retail design too. Last year, I wrote about how the rise in digital ordering was, as restaurant workers struggled under a workload that depended little on the number of customers in the store. The good news is they are working on solving the problem. The bad news is: I am the problem.
Like the parallel remote-work phenomenon, the rise of what McDonald’s calls the Three D’s—digital, drive-thru, and delivery—may reflect an ongoing social atomization as the shared spaces that emptied out during the pandemic are slow to fill back up, to the point that walk-up, dine-in customers like me are no longer the focus, and might even be a nuisance.
when U.S. consumers spent $3 at the grocery for every $2 at the restaurant. “Breakfast spending is the fastest-growing daypart,” one industry analyst observed, “and that’s the ultimate utility. No one is sitting down for breakfast.”That’s probably what’s motivating coffee-centric chains, among which Panera isn’t the only one scrambling to scrap seating areas. As Jonathan Maze wrote this summer in
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