Green Daily

A long time ago in consumer culture history, an important decision was made: every low-priced restaurant should cater to drivers and their efforts to maximize caloric intake while minimizing output.

Nowadays, everyone's fat and the downsides of the drive-thru culture have become painfully obvious -- maybe it's time to re-examine the benefits of 'the window.' What if we found that all of the time we spent burning precious gasoline, emitting pollution, and conveniently sitting on our backsides, we were actually not getting our food as fast as if we walked in?

That's exactly the question asked by 2 Canadian reporters who decided to put the drive-thru window to the test. Using stop watches and carbon footprint calculators, they set out to find out if driving through the window is actually any faster than walking up to the counter. They went to the local McDonald's, Starbucks, and Tim Hortons, on their mission and when the results came in, they weren't very surprising.

The winner: there was no real difference in the time it took to get their orders, but of course the drive-through customer did succeed at emitting a boatload of CO2. So there you have it, drive-thrus are the root of all evil. Figures.