- So are we gonna ignore two window drive-thrus going extinct?
They were already on the way there when I got my first job at Burger King in 2006. We had a first window (officially called "the hole"), but we never had enough employees to man it. When we did, it ate our labor cost percentage alive, so store management was never keen on letting us have someone to man it. It didn't really help our drive thru times much anyway, since the real time sinks were waiting for people to decide on what they wanted at the menu board, and for food to come out of the kitchen, not the paying. I'm not surprised that other restaurants are coming to the conclusion that having someone in the hole isn't worth the money and not even building them on new restaurants.
Of note is that, for a while in the 1990s, McDonalds was using
three windows, one for ordering (in lieu of a speakerbox), one for paying, one for pickup. Later they reverted to a traditional speakerbox and two-window setup.