The Cost of Convenience Culture

Or: why I hate the Starbucks drive-through

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

Few things make me more irrationally irritated than the Starbucks drive-through.

It shouldn’t bother me because, as a non-coffee-drinker, I rarely go to Starbucks. But it does.

At the suburban Starbucks locations near my home, the drive-through is always clogged with cars. One of them, with a poorly designed parking lot, routinely backs its line of cars up onto the main road, snarling traffic. The actual parking spaces around the store are often mostly empty, signifying that nobody’s inside. All of the customers are sitting in their cars.

So when I have to change lanes in traffic to get around the queue of Pathfinders and Tahoes sticking out into the main road, I tend to think uncharitable thoughts:

• Are these people really so lazy that they can’t park their cars and walk into the store?
• Don’t they know that they’re probably going to sit out here, idling their gas-guzzlers, for longer than it would take to walk in and pick up their order?
• And don’t they care that, by seeking a little bit of convenience for themselves, they’re making things less convenient for everyone else?
• All this for an $8 milkshake that tastes like coffee?