But it turns out that we end up liking some of the non-normal activities and we’re stuck with them. Most of us have far more Zoom meetings than we used to and may opt for telehealth visits, even if we’ve happily retired all our masks and vowed never to sweep our groceries again.
From a business perspective, this presents an interesting question, explains Kellogg’s Sunil Chopra: “Which new consumer behaviors stuck and what didn’t?”
Chopra and his colleagues set out to answer this question in the context of fast food restaurants. Specifically, they wanted to know whether the pandemic-era shift from store meals to takeaways was short-lived or long-lasting.
They find that, by a wide margin, people stick to take-out orders as opposed to sit-down meals at three major fast-food chains. And this change in preferences is driving a huge part of the post-COVID-19 recovery in fast-food outlets. Average monthly visits to stores with drive-thru losses were down slightly in December 2022 compared to December 2019. However, at stores without screenings, visits were down almost 50%.
“The data is pretty tight,” says co-author Ioannis Stamatopoulos, who earned his PhD from Kellogg and is now at the University of Texas at Austin. “People have really changed the way they get fast food.”
And these changes have implications not only for fast food companies but also for urban planners.
“On the one hand, the presence of drivers can cause traffic congestion,” says Chopra, a business professor at the Kellogg School. “But we also see that without going through the drive-thru, some of these fast food places are going to have a very difficult time surviving. I think these are things that designers need to consider.”
Short vs long trips
The researchers used data from 2018 to 2022 for more than 17,000 stores across three chains: McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks. These outlets make up about 10 percent of all fast food outlets in the US
The data is based on mobile phone traffic and is grouped into visits that lasted less than five minutes, between five and 20 minutes, 20 to 60 minutes or more than an hour. The researchers categorized visits as either short visits lasting 20 minutes or less, or long visits lasting more than 20 minutes.
When comparing short and long visit patterns, they found clear differences between post-pandemic patterns in stores with and without imports. Long-term visits did not recover to 2019 levels in either store type by 2022. Short-term visits, on the other hand, almost recovered in loss-making stores but not in non-losing stores. And those short visits made a huge difference. While visits to loss-making stores fell by only 4 percent after the pandemic, visits to non-drive-thru stores fell by 48 percent.
The researchers concluded that the short visits were probably en-route visits rather than pickups or delivery drivers. This was because curbside pickups and delivery pickups can occur in stores with or without carry-overs, yet short visits only increased in loss-making stores. The researchers also controlled for other variables, such as store location and neighborhood demographics, and found that these did not affect the overall findings.
To put these trends into perspective, the researchers estimated that changes in customer behavior among non-drive-thru stores are proportional to 25 percent of Starbuck’s total customers, and half of its revenue is driven by non-drive-thru. transported to stores by car.
“The magnitude of change is really profound,” says co-author Partha Mishra, a doctoral student at Kellogg. “It really speaks to the stickiness of this behavior change.”
And indeed, fast food companies are already taking note and changing their strategies. For example, researchers point to Chipotle, which now includes drive-throughs at most of the new stores it opens.
Why do people stick with drive-throughs?
The sticky behavior is clear, but the reasons are less so. Researchers have some untested hypotheses about the long-term shift toward drive-throughs.
A potentially relevant finding is that drive-through stores saw some recovery in their long-term visits, while non-drive-through stores did not. So people could simply switch their preferred store to one with a drive-through for all their visits, Stamatopoulos says. “Part of the story could be that I started going to a store that has a drive and now that’s my store,” he says. “This has become a habit for me and there is no reason to break the habit.”
Or it could be that people consume their fast food differently, he says. Before the pandemic, maybe the whole family would come over for a meal or treat. Now they are more than happy to take it and enjoy it at home.
Stamatopoulos hopes that future research will examine the reasons behind these findings. “If we understand the specific mechanism at play here, we will be better able to predict how future changes will affect consumers.”
As such, the results have implications for urban planners and policy makers.
If companies start pushing for more routes, it will affect traffic patterns. And if drive-thru stores, which are often in downtowns, start closing at high rates, that could change the character of those neighborhoods.
Fast food companies themselves are not unaware of these changes, the researchers say. In fact, they found some examples of fast-food chain executives quoted in articles talking about a push for more stores, the need for more car lanes, or plans to downsize dining areas.
“Other reliable sources made similar statements,” says Stamatopoulos. “But that’s the scientific way to do it — go out there and get all the data and painstakingly analyze it. It’s good that people’s intuition is aligning with what we’re finding.”
