‘Drive forward to the second window!’ But what happened to the first drive-thru window?

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — It had a good run.

Long before drive-thru innovation meant tablet-toting Chick-fil-A employees in multiple lanes and some customers using their own screens to order and pay before they even get to a fast-food restaurant, a lower-tech improvement — a second window for the single lane — promised faster food.

The additional window — which became known as the “first window,” because drivers came to it first after placing their orders at squawk boxes — was just for collecting money and maybe delivering drinks; burgers and fries came at the second window.

But now?

“Alright, I’ve got $7.72. Second window. Thank you!” squawked the box at a Wendy’s along Front Street in Susquehanna Township, just north of Harrisburg. The first window had what appeared to be a semi-permanent sign — “Please drive ahead” — with an arrow pointing to the other window.

“We totally bypass the first window,” said Sandy Bretz of Harrisburg, describing her typical experience nowadays at drive-thru windows.

The one exception, according to Bretz, and corroborated by abc27 News observations of local fast-food restaurants: Many McDonald’s locations continue using both windows — under signs labeled “pay here” and “pick up” — at least during peak periods. At a sampling of Burger King and Wendy’s locations, “first windows” appeared to have long since fallen out of use, with supplies sometimes stored where employees once collected cash and made change.

Contacted by abc27 News to confirm the trend and ask for any figures available about how many locations have but have stopped using the first drive-through window, Wendy’s declined to comment; McDonald’s and Burger King didn’t respond.

At a combination KFC-Taco Bell along I-83 in Newberry Township, a drive-thru worker said the first drive-thru window has been idle so long — since long before he started — that he didn’t know it existed until he noticed drivers stopping at it for what to him seemed like no reason.

Why?

“I think it’s because they don’t have the help, to be honest with you,” Sandy Bretz guessed.

Good guess, said Kristen Hawley, the founder of Expedite, a newsletter that covers restaurant tech trends. Hawley is based in San Francisco but is from Harrisburg — she remembers, as a child, looking forward to Happy Meals at the McDonald’s along Eisenhower Boulevard.

Compared to past decades, “it’s a lot harder to staff a fast-food restaurant, and everyone’s trying to do more with less,” Hawley said.

She said there’s also the reality that what used to be a time-consuming part of the process — collecting cash and making change (McDonald’s didn’t even begin accepting credit cards until 2003) — can now be a quick tap, and that’s for customers who even need to pay at all when they reach the window; others order and pay via the chains’ apps before they even get to the restaurant.

Hawley said tech-forward customers will increasingly speed through their own pick-up lanes, separated from Luddites who insist on something so passé as ordering and paying (gasp!) at a restaurant.

But she said Luddites, too, will increasingly encounter new technology. Maybe you’ll order at a Hardee’s squawk box, but the person taking the order won’t be a person at all — rather, an artificial intelligence (AI) robot Hawley says is so good that you won’t know it’s a robot.

“95% of its AI orders do not require human intervention,” Hawley said, citing information from a company called Presto Automation, which supplies the technology. “But it is monitored, so if the AI freaks out or the person freaks out, there are humans that can step in and take over.”

The parent company of Hardee’s told abc27 News it hasn’t yet deployed the technology in Pennsylvania.

Another experience coming soon: Driving under a Taco Bell, where employees will use small food elevators to deliver food to drivers.

As drive-thrus grow, fast-food dining rooms shrink and in some cases disappear, which Hawley said is fine with most of us, who increasingly pick the drive-thru anyway. Why?

Hawley said it’s sad but true: “I truly believe it’s because we don’t want to talk to people who we don’t know.”

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