Have you ever found yourself sitting at fast food? drive thru A lane that wasn’t that fast?
Maybe you’re driving down the road and see a familiar sign, and maybe you’re feeling a little hungry and craving a particular type of nugget, nachos, or French fries. You enter a hamburger shop and go to that shop. drive thru speaker.
Seeing a long line of cars ahead of you can be depressing (and frustrating). You sigh, accepting the fact that it will be a while before you get back on the road, and steer with the other hand as you plunge your hand into the greasy bag.
Decided you don’t want to wait for the woman in the giant SUV in front of you to choose something from a menu you’ve probably seen a thousand times? They’re catching you and you can’t leave without ordering something.
Keep this in mind the next time you end up waiting forever for a double bacon cheeseburger and a large Coke with no ice. While nudging toward the first window, your car is probably burning precious fossil fuels.
A gallon of regular gasoline is still well over $3. You’re literally burning money and pumping hydrocarbons into the air while you wait forever for an extra worthwhile meal. If those in power get their way, you’ll soon be driving something like a cell phone that needs to be plugged into the wall before you go to bed at night. (Of course, at the other end of that plug is, you guessed it, a power plant that runs on fossil fuels.)
Instead, you can always park indoors and run. That means you risk starring in a viral video of a fast food employee arguing with an irate customer. There is no “special sauce” so special that you risk your life.
However, skipping the drive-thru and ordering at the in-store counter offers additional benefits. At least you should get some exercise. It’s definitely a necessity after eating the calorie-dense, premature-dead, yet oh-so-delicious dishes on most fast-food menus.
Maybe you are thinking this. “Wow, whoever wrote this crap must be stuck in the drive-thru and feeling too bitter about the whole thing.” And you would be right. Sometimes, when you’re stuck in your car for 15+ minutes, hungry, and start wondering why it’s taking so long, a crazy idea pops into your head.
But with fries on the way, it might not seem like such a good idea after all. Sure, you’ve wasted precious gas and even more precious hours of your relatively short life, but if you’re worried about the future, you probably don’t eat junk food.
Mark Barthall is the associate editor of the Huron Daily Tribune.send him an email mark.birdsall@hearstnp.com.