Why has Britain embraced drive-thru'?

McDonald's, Krispy Kreme, Starbucks, Costa, Greggs – the UK's leading coffee and fast food chains are opening lots more drive-thru' outlets.

It’s not a blue plaque, but at least McDonald’s honours its own history

I was on the train to Manchester on Saturday (to attend a family party), when Radio 4 called asking if I could come on the PM programme to discuss a column I had written for The Times on the rise of drive thru’ (I pains me to write it the American way, but everyone in the UK property/fast-food/retail industry have adopted this abomination; apologies). Meaningful Vision, a market research company, says the UK now has 2,681 drive-throughs, with 300 extra added in the last two years; rents on drive-thru’ sites have rocketed in recent years, as companies vie for precious space; lot of new chains who you would not necessarily associate with drive thru’ – notably Greggs – have started to open them in serious numbers. Greggs now has 50.

Sure, I told the producer, I was happy to come on the show. They then asked if there was any chance I could speak to the nation from an actual drive-thru’. Radio loves audio atmosphere, the beeps of a check-out, the roar of a crowd, the rustle of autumn leaves.

I told them I could do one better. I could visit Britain’s first ever drive-thru’ – a McDonald’s in Fallowfield, on the bottom end of curry mile on the edge of Manchester. It’s only a couple of miles from where I was staying and I’ve never been. I’ve visited Britain’s first ever McDonald’s in Britain, opening in 1974, in Woolwich, south east London; I’ve gone to Hamburger University (McDonald’s HQ) in Chicago. This felt like a missing part of the jigsaw. The producer was thrilled.

McDonald’s Fallowfield, Manchester, the UK’s first ever drive-thru, opened in 1986

Of course, when I got there and did a sound check on my phone, the studio engineer told me that the sound quality from inside the McDonald’s was terrible; was there any chance I could go somewhere quieter? So, I went across the road and stood by a quiet tree. I should have just done it from home. Hey ho.

But I got to meet the lovely manager, Jake, who told me that this branch broke the record for the most breakfast orders in a single hour in any McDonald’s in the UK. It was £4,231 for 361 customers 10am to 11am in a September 2021 – on the day Parklife (one of Manchester’s big music festivals) hosted its first event post-Covid. That’s a lot of egg McMuffins.

If you do the maths, you’ll see that is £11.72 per order, which is very high for a fast-food order. People spend more at a drive-thru’, which is why companies keep on opening them. According to Circana, a market research company, consumers spend an average of £6.09 per head when using one of these outlets compared to £4.74 in-store, mostly because they visit in the evening, on the way home and buy a full meal, rather than just a snack. Or, equally, in the morning soaking up a festival hangover.

Fallowfield’s record breakfast orders were not just from people in cars, they were also from people ordering from home for delivery. This is another reason for their numbers mushrooming in recent years. Nearly all drive-thru’s double up as kitchens to cook delivery orders. Their location – invariably on a main road on the edge of a town – means they are the perfect place for Deliveroo or Uber Eats drivers to come and pick up orders. Who pays for a sausage roll to be delivered to their home? Don’t scoff: 6.7 per cent of Greggs’s sales – and this is a £2 billion business – were via delivery last year. That’s the equivalent of 100 million sausage rolls being couriered around by bike.

This helps explain why rents at drive-thru’s have shot up so much. According to Savills, the average rent in a shopping centre or high street is £24.80 per sq ft, only slightly higher than five years ago. For drive-throughs, rents have rocketed from £36.89, pre-Covid, to £46.65 per sq ft. There are just not enough plots of land to fulfil the demand.

Average rents for drive-thrus have shot up. Source: Savills

All of this explains why the likes of Greggs and Popeyes, the new(ish) chain of fried chicken, want to muscle into this market. But it doesn’t explain why consumers have embraced it so much, despite the fact that car traffic during the week has *still* not recovered to pre-Covid levels.

There are a few things going on, I think. Firstly, though car traffic is still down, the number of van drivers has shot up. Thanks to the boom in online shopping, light goods vehicle numbers are at 127 per cent compared to pre-Covid. That’s millions of extra DPD, Evri, Amazon and Tesco drivers on the road. Drive-thru is undeniably convenient when your job relies on fulfilling as many deliveries in as short a space as time as possible. At McDonald’s, for instance, if you order on its app, it uses geo-location to tell when you are close enough to the branch to start cooking the meal – so it’s ready as you pull up. Clever.

When I wrote my Times column, I said that too many councils have made it either impossible or disproportionately expensive to park on a high street. If you wage war on the motorist with endless low-traffic neighbourhoods, maybe it’s not a surprise that many drivers decide it’s more convenient to do a lot of their spending at chains on the edge of town, rather than support independent businesses on the high street.

I underestimated how much this chimed with readers. The most liked comment was this (below), but there were plenty others who said they hardly ever visited their nearest town high streets because of parking charges.

A reader comment under my Times column

Some choose drive-through, however, not because it is cheaper or more convenient but because they got used to no-contact transactions during Covid and want to keep it that way. I was talking to a friend who treats his six-year-old child to a drive through McDonald’s as a weekly treat. When I asked why they didn’t eat it in the restaurant, he answered: “I don’t really want to interact with all the other people.” He said this matter of factly, not in a socially-anxious way.

I think a surprising number of people just don’t like their fellow citizens. They are not misanthropes per se; they like their friends and family, but they don’t want to hang out with lots of strangers.

Covid still casts its shadow. Many people withdrew from the hundreds of quiet, serendipitous interactions with strangers in favour of staying in the cocoon of their own home or vehicle. Drive-thru scratches that itch.