sierraclub.typepad.com/mrgreen/2009/02/advice-about-recre…
In drive-throughs or anyplace, idling is, to summon the old saying, the devil’s workshop. Every hour you idle, you waste up to 0.7 gallons of gas (depending on your engine type) going nowhere. So it pays to turn your engine off if you’re going to be still for more than 30 seconds. In a given year, U.S. cars burn some 1.4 billion gallons of fuel just idling. Not to mention idling trucks, which waste another 1.5 billion gallons. Collectively, we emit about 58 million tons of carbon dioxide while we’re essentially doing nothing.
Taking the fast-food industry as an example, and taking into account that the average McDonald’s drive-through wait is 159 seconds, we can calculate that the company’s consumers burn some 7.25 million gallons of gas each year. The figure for the entire U.S. fast-food industry? Roughly 50 million gallons.
The spread of American idle may be an exciting prospect for companies seeking to expand this lazy food-getting method to the rest of the world–but it’s a devastating one for the environment. Consider that McDonald’s plans to open 25 drive-throughs in China, following KFC’s lead. KFC installed its first drive-through there in 2002 and is working on 100 more. If China and India, which is also jumping aboard the drive-through bandwagon, get up to speed, they can idle away a truly staggering figure: 30 billion gallons of gas. Every year.
www.thesmartset.com/article/article09120901.aspx
In 2000, Wendy’s led the industry in terms of speediness, taking an average of only 150.3 second to serve customers at its drive-through window. By 2008, it had reduced its average serving time to 131 seconds. But that’s still 131 seconds during which drivers are idling noisily and wastefully. According to Sierra Club estimates, people waiting at fast food restaurants burn approximately 50 million gallons of gasoline a year. At the current rate of $2.58 per gallon, that’s $129 million.
. . . All across Canada and the U.S., there are efforts to ban drive-throughs, just as there have been for at least the two decades. For many, the drive-through — and especially the fast-food drive-through — is the most potent symbol of the unhealthy, car-centric culture that’s making us fat and unhealthy, poisoning the planet, and locking us into an alienating, stressed-out consumerist lifestyle that for all its abundance and variety, doesn’t deliver true satisfaction and is ultimately unsustainable.
drivethrulies.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/drive-through-sham…
McDonald’s is the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, pork and potatoes – and the second largest purchaser of chicken.
The McDonald’s Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent.
McDonald’s spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand.
. . . The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. . . . In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of "the McDonaldization of America". He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing inluence on American life. . . . Much of what Hightower feared has come to pass. The centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation’s food supply. Moreover, the tremendous success of the fast food industry has encouraged other industries to adopt similar business methods.
from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
