Have you ever worried about growing old in a drive-thru?
Of course not. The whole point behind a drive-thru is to give your order, go to the window, collect your purchase, and be on your way, bing, bang, and boom.
Too bad that’s not my personal experience.
Drive-thru lanes are congested, polluting, sometimes tense with traffic-jockeying, and probably not the best use of time. All for a coffee.
And that doesn’t count the times they got your order wrong and you had to double back to either go through the line again or exit your vehicle to seek redress inside the restaurant. Seriously folks, there’s a whole genre on YouTube dedicated to drive-thru melt-downs. It makes for good television but honestly, it’s not a lifestyle for everyone..
Have you ever wondered how much of your life is spent in drive-thrus? Is it enough that you might just as well block out some dedicated time on your mobile calendar app? And if you were to enter it into your calendar, how much time would you allow for? A minute? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Maybe even twenty minutes, or more?
Remember the whole thing about how you spend one third of your life, or thereabouts, sleeping? That piece of information informs me that I’ve spent 20 years sleeping. I wonder what the data would be for drive-thrus? Could it be that I’ve spent a total of six months of my life idling in my car and cursing out the drive-thru rookie in front of me? I just pulled six months out of thin air, but I do wonder what the real number would be. Hopefully less, but maybe more.
You know you might need to check your personal priorities when you bring a novel with you for the drive-thru. Or if you use it as a chance to catch up on paperwork or needlepoint. If you have to build value time into your drive-thru experience, maybe life is telling you something.
For me, it was not only time-consuming, but expensive. In the early 2000’s, I calculated the cost of a medium Tim Hortons regular coffee to be $21.50. That’s a buck-fifty for the coffee and twenty bucks for the gas going through the drive-thru. This is why purchasing an electric vehicle for $80,000 makes sense, if only for the drive-thru savings in fuel costs. And you’d be an environmental champion to boot.
At my age, time becomes precious. I honestly can’t afford to be spending that amount of time in a Starbucks drive-thru waiting for a designer coffee from Louis Vuitton or Chanel. Nor can afford it with the economy being the way it is.
So for me, it’s the jar of Tim Hortons decaf from No Frills that gets me closest to the experience. No lines, no waiting, no swearing at the guy, and there’s always a guy. Just a simple cup of coffee for a simple man trying to live simply.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 