Drive Thru for Rent?

The other day I was out driving around, when I passed a small commercial building by the side of the road with a large “For Rent” sign nailed to it. This isn’t unusual in Central Michigan, where the slow economy has driven a number of businesses under and made it difficult to start new ones (or rent out the space they used to occupy). The sign was unusual because it didn’t start with the usual text of “Commercial Property For Lease” or “Will subdivide/modify to suit” or even with the square footage of the building, but rather with the phrase “Drive-Thru for Rent!” and underneath it continued “BBQ? Tacos? Coffee?” before giving the real estate agent’s contact information. This wouldn’t be that unusual either; as I like to point out, food service is one of the hardest industries in which to turn a profit, and the current economic crisis hasn’t done drive-thru places in Central Michigan any favors, either. It’s just that this particular structure used to be a bank…

I should interject here that drive-thru business locations are much more popular in Michigan than in most of the other states I’ve visited in my travels. Given the long, cold winters and generally crappy weather, people prefer to get in and out of their cars as infrequently as possible; thus you see more drive-thru banking locations, restaurants, coffee houses, pharmacies and other businesses than in more temperate climates. In this particular case, the former bank building was only big enough to have held two or three desks and a small teller area (maybe four or five employees at most), but it included three separate drive-thru lanes. The line closest to the building was the typical bullet-proof window and access drawer arrangement, but the two outer lanes both made use of speakers and pneumatic tube systems…

Now, I can see driving up to a window, placing an order, putting your money in the drawer, and then receiving your food the same way; it’s not all that different from any other fast-food operation. But the thought of tacos or barbequed meat – or worse yet, cups of coffee – being sent through a pneumatic tube system gave me a long moment of incredulous laughter. Okay; so unlike in the movies, real pneumatic tubes send their cargo in a capsule, which would tend to contain the barbeque sauce, hot sauce, or coffee. In real life, the capsules also don’t fly through the tubing at the rate you see on the big screen, which means that they wouldn’t end up spraying everything you’ve purchased all over the neighborhood in the first place. It’s still an amusingly silly image…

Of course, all that will probably happen is that somebody will rent the building and just use the window and drawer to serve customers, leaving the outer two lanes unused. Or, perhaps, some enterprising businessperson will figure out that you could have people place their orders through the outboard lane’s intercom and then loop around to pick up their food through the window and drawer. Or, more likely yet, either the tenant or the landlord will modify the property, including the drive-thru lanes, to suit the new occupant’s business model, whatever that turns out to be. But there’s still a small part of me (left over from a miss-spent childhood, no doubt) that wishes the new tenants really would try using the pneumatic tubes to deliver food to their customers. I’m not sure if they’d be able to make money on the food, but they could probably charge admission to watch people receive their orders via air pressure…