Looks like covid lockdown time.
Though it’s true that this particular picture was taken during covid time, it does not mean its any less true in conveying what North American car culture has actually done to our cities and infrastructure planning/implementation.
Here is a video of how school drop off’s work in North America for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLpCMdVcqTI
Looking at this particular plot of land in the image OP has posted. Land use is very poorly utilized. You have one business surrounded by a parking lot. This same space could have easily in a European city fit 5 or more businesses with plenty of residential units above and still be left with place for green space or a park.
30 people getting coffee vs 30 people getting coffee.
And a comparable parcel of land roughly the same size. Its night and day in terms of utilization of land alone.
Reminds me of how my (able bodied) mom would drive around looking for a closer parking spot for far longer than it would have taken to just walk from the first available one.
Literally! Anytime I go to Costco i intentionally go to the furthest spots because they’re likely to be open and I’m fully capable of and enjoy walking.
You also can’t ride the cart through the parking lot if you park too close. Then you just look silly kicking it up to speed for just a short ride.
(I’m almost 40 and still do this every time I have to go shopping, like a reward for completing the draining task)
Tough with the full cart (choo choo) but esp. rewarding when returning the empty: yee-haw!
I’m the one who parks in the spot right beside you, just to mess with you.
I’m the one who uses a series of car dollies to move your parked car one parking lane over, just to mess with you.
😧
The more the merrier! I have a compact SUV and park in the middle of the space :)
My trick is to park further away but on a straight line to the entrance, not diagonal. I think it’s often shorter.
A former friend I met up with at a pub parked in a handicapped spot because they couldn’t find a spot in less than two blocks. They didn’t have a handicap or a disability vehicle tag. I had biked and walked four blocks just because I liked walking. Stopped being friends with them after that for being so ableist and a general asshole. Really tells you a lot about a person.
I purposefully park in the back. I don’t get enough walking casually throughout the day. Plus I don’t want people to ding my car.
Man even when I park in the back with tons of empty spots some fucking loser will without fail park next to me.
My dad’s like that. One time he came to visit he didn’t like that the closest spot was 2 blocks away, so he drove around until he found a spot 5 or 6 blocks away
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Funny thing, my dad would get mad at his kids when they said that. Everybody had to suffer through it with him!
My mother used to do that, too. I asked her about it, and she said, “You don’t know how scary it is for a woman to walk a long distance in a parking lot.”
Yeah, I’ll park a while away if it’s daytime, but I do get the creeps when I walk through an empty parking lot at night. I used to live in the US and drive regularly, and now I live in Germany and don’t, but I can therefore completely avoid parking lots even though I’m walking further, which honestly makes me feel a lot less targetable. I suspect the difference in general violence levels between the two countries has more to do with the difference in my perceived safety though.
That could be true in some cases. Not so much when it’s the middle of the day, in rich suburbia, with your family, and there’s a lot of other people around.
I literally cannot stand this when carbrains do it lol
I hate how much time people waste doing this. Depending on the store, I either park a couple spots from the cart return stations, or enter the back of the lot and park first available. Whatever your goal, wasting time trying to find a spot that meets specific constraints just…. Wastes your time
At my Costco especially
- people fight for garage space but there’s a really long ramp for your cart so it’s effectively much farther
- people fight for the lot by the door, but it small and crowded and choked with both pedestrian and car traffic. I can be parked and in the store before you make one lap
- main parking is long and skinny, but people only go straight up the main aisles. I just go one aisle over and there are more spots closer in and right by cart return
The paradox of laziness.
My favorite is people who slam on the brakes and make everyone behind them wait for them while they park at the first spot they find at a parking garage (whether the current occupant has left or not).
Like, there are stairs and/or an elevator. It would take you less time and effort to park next to those and everyone behind you can park at the same time.
parking garage
There’s one in a shopping center I go to. The first row is always packed, the second row always has empty spaces. I always go straight for the second row, but I’m always the only person to do so. Thius enables me to park very close to the elevators with no searching, no hassle, no speed bumps. But all other cars kindly go around the whole carousel, no doubt hoping they will find a spot in first row. Which is often further from the elvators than my hassle-free second row spot. People are weird.
And because that took so long to explain and I just realized it might not be so easy to visualise, here’s a little illustration. The white line is me, the red line is everybody else.
the only time I do that is when I’m getting stupidly heavy objects, like freezers or furniture.
Was this taken during covid lockdowns when the indoor section was closed and there was no other option?
i think so. found this article
edit: and this
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This shit happens daily at the in-n-out near me. My wife swears th wait is worth it. Drives me nuts.
First, the city should be ticketing every single vehicle that is parking in the road and blocking traffic. If I was a cop, I would just park myself right there and hand out easy tickets all day every day. Being in line for a drive through does not excuse blocking traffic.
But the bigger issue that people here are missing is that going into the store may not actually save you any time. Often when I’ve tried that at places like McDonalds, the drive through is far faster than waiting in the kitchen. Their whole operation is optimized for the drive through, and in-kitchen orders end up stuck in this weird ghetto backlog that they’ll get to when they feel like getting to it.
The US is a silly place.
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If you are in the appropriate lane for the turn you intend to make, and the car in front of you isn’t moving, I’m pretty sure the law doesn’t require you to pick a different destination or ram the car ahead of you. What the law should be is a different question, but cop you would just see a bunch of tickets thrown out in quick succession. I don’t know what that realistically means for the job, but it can’t be good.
genuinely every time I go inside a place, it’s faster than drive through
There is a popular place near me where the line could be as long as the photo and they would get you through in a few minutes. Of course that involves having several people walking the cars getting orders and taking money. The window hands out the food as fast as the drivers can pull up. It’s insane but impressive.
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Portillo’s is what I was thinking of.
This is probably during COVID when the inside was off limits.
Plenty of people still use the drive through, but the complete lack of anyone in the carpark is sus.
I see this kind of thing regularly at my local Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers restaurant when it hits dinner time. The cars wrap around the building and block other traffic.
Same for the DQ where I live.
Former “partner”(ugh) circa 2015 here
Back when I walked for the bux, 5 years before covid, this was my daily drive thru experience. My store averaged about 6 grand (thats about 700 customers) on DT alone during our morning rush, 6 hours straight of underfilled cars starting their day with caffeine dessert.
This specific store could be a covid thing, but empty lobbies with cars wrapped around the building has kinda been starbie’s MO for the last decade or so that they’ve been transitioning away from “third place” mindset to “oh fuck we’re competing with McDicks mindset”
Until you realize that they purposefully understaff and now your front counter guy has to prioritize drive thru times over your order because that’s the only metric corporate measures.
Is nobody mentioning the fact that there are 4 lane roads surrounding the entire coffee shop? Like thats absolutely the least or one of the least efficient ways you could do urban planning. In areas similar to this where I live, the block sizes are at least like 5x wider and longer than whatever this is.
People were getting annoyed at the queue, so they kept adding one more lane?
Nah, they probably added more all around to make it “more convenient” for drivers to keep going straight and still get to the many different destinations possible, but they could just have one road and the drivers could head around a roundabout or something.
Great point, what sort of a hellscape is that!?
Well. Some places don’t offer counter service and their doors are locked. You have to use the drive thru. Otherwise I agree with you except I don’t get to even talk to a human, I am directed to a kiosk. And they flash a tip option. A tip for what?
Because if you go in there is just no one taking your order and they completely deprioritize it too. Takes just as long or longer half the time I’ve tried
They’ll tell you it’s because “nobody wants to work” when the reality is that people just stopped putting up with that job for the scraps they were paid. These places were never successful and deserve to go out of business as they rely on poverty wages for their existence.
That’s part of carbrain culture. Where I live, both options are equally fast because drive through is seldom used. And Germany is actually very carbrainy, but perhaps not completely lost yet.
Everyone behind the silver car at the parking lot entrance is illegally blocking the road. Regardless of the car culture problem or OP’s disingenuous use of a CoViD era image out of context, those people needed to go away. If you can’t get your coffee without parking in the street, you don’t get coffee at that location at that time. Safety is more important than someone getting their sugar/caffeine fix.
The legality really depends on the jurisdiction. Where I live, it is 100% the business responsibility to ensure this doesn’t happen, and if it does, there are big fines for the business, the customer is not at fault.
Plenty of things the business could do to reduce this, such as making people park up after ordering (a very popular option where I live), increasing prices to reduce their demand, having a digital queue system, removing the drive-through altogether, etc.
The brain rot is insane. Every Starbucks and Chickfila.
Not to excuse it but some restaurants prioritize drive through over the people who order inside.
50 tons of social stratification
I hope this isn’t a photo from mode pandemic… I mean fuck cars and all that, but drive thru was clutch for a bit there.
Someone mentioned that it was indeed pandemic time. Hence the lack of any parked cars.
There’s 26 spaces and 2 disabled spaces. There’s about 35 cars waiting in line but it’s not clear if they’re all in line for the restaurant or if they need to be in that lane for other reasons. Only one space is filled in the parking lot, 25 of these cars could be parked and have people inside, leaving maybe 10 cars for the drive through but even then the 10 in the drive through would be blocking cars from coming or going.
These drive-thrus are always so fucking badly designed.
Carbrained and fast-foodbrained. Cook a fuckin meal and you might save more time, jeeze.
It’s a coffee shop. Which is even worse than fast food.
