This seems like a bad idea because cars don’t have bathrooms… right? — Dan

Drive-in restaurants came to life in the 1920s when a place called Kirby's Pig Stand in Texas came up with a neat innovation — you’d drive up to a window, place your order, park — and wait. A waiter or waitress called a “carhop” would bring your food to you as you sat in the car. Over a few decades, that drive-in experience gave way to the drive-through experience we’re now familiar with today, where there’s no need for a carhop — the buyer of the burgers drives to a service window to pick up their food. It’s efficient for the business and consumer alike.

But drive-through restaurants can still be thwarted by a common enemy of anyone who spends a lot of time in their cars: traffic. If you have to get from A to B and want to pick up lunch on the way, a lot of other drivers clogging up the roadways may make you miss your opportunity to grab a bite to eat. For you, that means an empty stomach; for the restaurants, that means lost business.

But not to Burger King. To them, this was an opportunity. Well, in Mexico City, at least.

Over the last decade or so, real-time traffic apps have made driving easier. We have a lot of data which can tell us how quickly cars are flowing through out streets, and with that information, we can act accordingly. Typically, people use these apps to avoid the traffic or at least estimate their time of arrival. In 2019, though, BK used the data in a more innovative way, rolling out what they called “The Traffic Jam Whopper.”

The pilot program debuted in Mexico City, an urban area with notorious traffic jams. Burger King introduced an app which detected heavy traffic and offered drivers who weren’t doing a lot of actual driving a way to get a meal while they waited for traffic to subside. When conditions were right — the traffic was so heavy that there was little chance of customers going anywhere, and the customers were no more than 3km (about 2 miles) from a Burger King franchise — a hungry motorist could order themselves a Whopper and some fries. And the drivers wouldn’t have go to that local BK — the burger would come to them. As the Washington Post reported, Burger King “delivered [the food] directly to their car via motorcycle,” as seen above.

The idea was easy to promote, too. Per one case study, Burger King was able to place digital billboards in high-traffic areas, telling drivers to download the app and place their orders. (I hope the drivers put their cars in park first!) A captive audience — and a hungry one — was easy to reach. And the numbers showed that the idea was a success. Per Autoblog, “Burger King says the service increased BK app downloads by 44 percent and increased daily delivery orders by 63 percent,” and had plans to try the same idea in Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo. Those plans haven’t come to fruition, at least not yet, for unreported reasons (although it’s likely that the COVID-19 pandemic, which at least temporarily massively reduced traffic, has a role in this).

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Today’s Bonus fact: Drive-through windows have been around since at least the 1930s, but McDonald’s didn’t adopt them until the 1970s. As McD’s corporate site explains, the window was borne out of a business necessity for a franchise in Arizona: “The inspiration to move forward stemmed from soldiers located at Fort Huachuca Army Base. The restaurant was experiencing a decline in sales because soldiers had to follow the rule of staying in their vehicles when wearing fatigues or also known as Army uniforms, when off base.” The franchisee “solved this problem by installing a sliding window in the wall to facilitate Drive Thru orders,” and the addition proved so popular that many other franchises adopted the same practice. Per that same page, as of 2022, drive-through service now accounts for about 70% of McDonald’s U.S. business.

From the Archives: Dabbawala: An Indian custom that brings hot food from home to work, by way of bike deliveries.

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And thanks! — Dan