A driving force: Doing business through windows

These days Cape Girardeau residents can do just about anything without leaving their cars. The 2.6-mile stretch of Kingshighway between Bloomfield and Mount Auburn roads has 11 drive-through restaurants, seven drive-through ATMs, seven drive-through convenience stores and two drive-through pharmacies.

Even the Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center is getting into the act. For the last two years, it has offered drive-through flu vaccinations.

Drive-through restaurants, of course, are the granddaddy of them all, but they are no longer limited to burgers and fries. Mexican, Italian and even the carry-out staple Chinese can now all be enjoyed from the confines of an automobile in Cape Girardeau.

John Cai, owner of China Palace, said local competition made him decide to offer drive-through service when he opened his first restaurant here 10 years ago.

"I saw that all the other places had them," he said. "People think Chinese food means you wait a long time, but we can have most orders ready in two minutes. Even difficult foods we can make in five or six minutes, max."

Panera Bread and McDonald's have both chosen Cape Girardeau locations in recent years as testing sites for drive-through pilot programs.

Probably the most noticeable aspect of the drive-through boom in Cape Girardeau is the drive-through window at most gas-station convenience stores.

Rhodes Gas has seven locations in Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Scott City. Six have drive-through service.

"The first drive-through we put in was at a location on South Kingshighway in 1991," said co-owner Jim Maurer. "Since then every time we've renovated or built new stores they've all had drive-throughs. People really responded to it. If you get away from Southeast Missouri, you don't see many drive-throughs. But in this area it seems to work."

Maurer said that most convenience stores outside of the area don't believe it makes business sense to staff an employee at the drive-through window full time. But Maurer estimates that Rhodes 101 Stop does 20 percent of its business from the window.

The majority of Rhodes' drive-through business is fountain sodas, said Maurer, but beer, cigarettes and newspapers are also popular items.

Consumer psychology

Judy Wiles, a Southeast Missouri State University professor who specializes in marketing, thinks she knows why this mode of retail has become so popular.

"Certainly, convenience is the top reason, but from a consumer psychology point of view there is also the safety factor," Wiles said. "Market research people have found that, especially with women, they feel more comfortable doing certain business from the car. People associate convenience stores with robberies, more so than other places so they might feel safer from the car."

Women are also more likely to be traveling with young children.

"It's very distracting for a child to go into a new place," Wiles said, "and for a mother it might not be worth it if she has to get the kids out of the car-seats and into a restaurant or convenience store."

Southeast sociology professor Gerald Stott said that the whole culture has changed.

"I am amazed at the number of young people who eat out frequently," he said. "When I first started teaching here I felt that if we could go out for a burger on a Friday night we were doing pretty well, now it's every night."

Stott said that people have both more disposable income and less time than they did even one generation ago. People, he said, don't expect banking, shopping, or eating to be "events." They just want them to be as quick and painless as possible.

Southeast sociology professor Larry Hamilton said that when he came to town Pfister's Drive-In on Broadway was the only one of its kind in town. He thinks that drive-through restaurants are appealing to people wary of the stigma of eating alone and that drive-through convenience stores allow people to easily buy items that might be embarrassing to buy inside the store.

None of this, however, explains why Cape Girardeau has become such a mecca for drive-through commerce.

"I know it's not like that in other places," said Chamber of Commerce president John Mehner. "I've had people come up and say, 'I bet Cape has more drive-throughs than any place else its size.' It might be true, and I don't know why that is."

tgreaney@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245