The real inventor of the fast food drive-through

In 1948, Richard and Maurice McDonald turned a San Bernardino, California, carhop drive-in hamburger stand into the progenitor of all fast food restaurants today by limiting the menu to just a few items. Self-imposed constraints allowed us to focus on extreme efficiency in serving our customers. However, McDonald’s didn’t invent the fast food drive-thru. That honor goes to Jesse G. Kirby, owner of Kirby’s Pig His Stand, which opened in Dallas, Texas in 1921.

From Open Culture:

of Fast Food: The Fastlane of Life, In the History Chanel documentary above, Texas Pig Stand president Jessie G. Kirby, the chain’s founder, said, “People with cars are so lazy that they don’t want to get out of their cars and go out to eat. was famous for,” he said. The prophecy proved very true. Even though the spread of car ownership across America and then around the world made drive-thru fast food a viable proposition, it provided companies with faster time to product. We’re putting more and more pressure on (and continuing to put) that.

The documentary’s narrator says, “Beyond the technical hardware challenges of getting things delivered quickly, the industry needed to provide a pipeline for delivering food.” “Throughout the ’80s, the burger giants set out to design a network of suppliers capable of delivering millions of tons of food to thousands of restaurants with strict uniform standards.”