Is outdoor dining a relic of the past?

It may surprise readers in the northeast to know that Chick-fil-A — the fast food icon of the Bible Belt whose stores are closed on Sundays, with no exceptions — has yet to reopen its dining rooms despite the relatively lax attitude Southern states have towards the pandemic. The lack of dine-in service didn’t stop the company from having its best year ever in 2020 as drive-thru lanes backed up with families looking to get their hands on the chain’s famous chicken sandwiches and waffle fries.
Given technological innovations, changes in the ways customers order and shifts in the labour market, the best time to reopen dining rooms might be never. While that’s not likely to happen, it makes good business sense for fast food companies to move away from dine-in service to focus on other, more profitable channels where they’ve been investing over the past year.
Think about the difference in costs of providing dine-in service versus a drive-thru lane or pickup window. Dine-in service requires stores with larger footprints to make room
for tables, chairs, seating
areas and bathrooms. Those spaces need to be furnished.
They need to be cleaned by workers who may also be juggling taking orders, preparing food and operating the restaurant. You’re going to occasionally have to deal with unruly people, and in general customers linger for longer.
For drive-thru or pickup service, customers place their orders, get their food and leave: in and out in under 350 seconds.
It’s easy to understand why a fast-food restaurant operator would prefer the latter, all else equal.
And restaurants have spent the past year innovating on non-dining room service capabilities, since that was the only option they had. They shaved seconds off drive-thru wait times. They pushed more customers to ordering online via their apps, with Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc reporting that digital ordering overtook in-person ordering in their most recent quarter. Curbside and delivery business grew.
Chick-fil-A has been remodeling stores across the country to add a second drive-thru lane, while McDonald’s Corp sees the drive thru as the future of its business.
This is arguably yet another change accelerated by the pandemic; I wrote almost three years ago that Starbucks Corp was saying that its future growth would be more about suburban drive thrus rather than urban stores.

—Bloomberg