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Just in the last month and a half, here in the Tampa Bay area, a drunk man assaulted a McDonald's drive-through worker because she had bungled his order. "I hit her in the … head with a bag of food," the man told the deputies who arrested him. "So what?"
At a different McDonald's, but for the same reason, a middle school teacher took aim at a drive-through employee and threw her hash browns. Later, she worried — rightly — that this might damage her good reputation.
Drive-through malfeasance is far from a Florida-specific phenomenon. Perhaps you heard about the woman in Toledo, Ohio, who last year tried to order McNuggets in the morning and was told they were unavailable as a breakfast option. She became (1) enraged and (2) a regrettable YouTube sensation.
The drive-through window has been around for about 80 years. Banks, not restaurants, actually introduced the concept, but now it accounts for some 70 percent of the almost $170 billion of annual sales in the fast-food industry.
"The drive-through," traffic guru Tom Vanderbilt once wrote, "is where one American obsession — mobility — meets another: consumption." It has become an iconic piece of modern infrastructure, he said, "the sickly sweet commingling of ambient grease and tailpipe exhaust."
No great surprise, then, that it often also seems to be the scene of mostly petty criminality.
"The things that make it convenient for customers make it convenient for criminals."
That's Rosemary Erickson. She's a crime consultant and a forensic sociologist in Miami. "There's an escape route," she said. "That's the No. 1 thing criminals look for."
Also, she added, "the bars close and people go to the drive-through."
Kevin Doll concurs.
"Their customers may be intoxicated coming from drinking establishments," the Pasco County sheriff's spokesman said. "Anything that's open 24 hours, you're going to have the people who seem to get in trouble in the wee hours of the morning." Law enforcement calls it "deep night."
The very consciously engineered convenience — easy in, easy out — makes the drive-through convenient not only for seekers of greasy comestibles, but also for those who might be looking to make some mischief on the move.
Sometimes it's serious. People beat each other with sticks at the drive-through at Sonic. People order four McDonald's double cheeseburgers, roll up to the window, show a black semiautomatic pistol and ask not so nicely for money. People manage to order food and then fall asleep in their idling cars because they've had too much to drink. Some of those people have their kids in the back. All of these things have happened around here over the last year. They are not laughing matters.
More often, though, incidents are cases of low-brow performance art stoked by the latest handheld technology, pranks taken too far, dumb-dumbs being dumb-dumbs.
Like the couple of guys in Deltona last month who arrived at a Burger King drive-through in a car with a smoky and particularly aromatic interior and thought it was the most hilarious thing ever when they ordered a "blunt and some herbs." The drive-through worker took down their license plate number. The cops were waiting for them when they got home.
Or the young couple in Illinois, who a couple of weeks ago decided it would be a scream to go through the drive-through at the local McDonald's with no clothes on. They weren't thinking about charges of indecent exposure. They just thought it might be funny.
Ha.
• • •
That's not it. That's not the extent of the explanation.
"You have the waiting game," said Doll, the Pasco sheriff's spokesman. "People get irate having to wait in any type of line. That includes waiting in line in a vehicle. That can cause tempers to flare.
"It's kind of a stationary road rage."
That's a heck of a thought. A heck of a phrase. Stationary road rage. It's also more true than you'd like to believe.
Some researchers at the University of Toronto did a study a couple of years ago that showed even just looking at fast-food logos made people more impatient and impulsive. Images of libraries, on the other hand, the researchers noted, made people lower their voices.
Said one of the researchers: "I think logos or other situational cues all have the same type of effect of 'automaticity' — regulatory behavior that is beyond our control." Said another: "Maybe exposure to the icons of fast food gives a bit of a boost to the short-term 'animal' side of our natures."
The average wait for a drive-through customer at Taco Bell is 2 minutes and 4 seconds. The average wait for a drive-through customer at Wendy's is 30 seconds less.
It's part of what University of Maryland sociologist George Ritzer calls the McDonaldization of society, "the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate all aspects of our lives," efficiency above all else.
Drive-throughs, he has said, are "rigidly controlled in the way that they are structured, their surveillance, things like that."
"This turns them into dead sorts of settings."
Staff writers Jamal Thalji and John Woodrow Cox contributed to this report, which also used information from the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the National Post, the Toronto Star, Slate and Bloomberg Businessweek. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8751. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelkruse.
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