The American people are all about convenience and efficiency. They want things fast and without having to go out of their ways to get ’em. It’s the reason so many businesses have drive-thru features, from restaurants, to coffee shops, to banks, to liquor stores, to car washes. One drive-thru concept that never got off the ground, however, was the idea of a drive-thru grocery store.
Paleo Future recently revisited the idea and even found old photos and design drawings from a 1928 issue of
Science and Invention magazine. The sketch seen above shows a fairly straight-forward idea. Build a retail space in the shape of a U, and the cars will drive next to shelves full of food items. People can just grab what they want and pay at the end of the line. New innovations are never that simple, though, and plenty of problems arose.
Aside from the issue of exhaust fumes getting trapped inside the building (the article goes into more detail about this), bottlenecks would be frequent. Although there is the convenience of never leaving the vehicle, it forces everybody to stay in one line and to wait on everybody else to pick and choose what they want.
Additionally, the idea just didn’t make practical sense when compared to the traditional method of walking around a grocery store. In a way, staying in the car actually makes things harder, especially if you forget to grab an item, or are waiting behind a massive 50-item order to purchase one or two things.
The article goes on to discuss how the idea has continued to pop up through the generations and includes video of what a modern drive-thru grocery could look like. Read the full piece on
Paleo Future.
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