Hot Take: Why Drive-Thru Culture Has Failed to Launch in Lagos
When the legendary Mercy Eke said, “that’s not how we roll in this Laygurs,” she could easily have been referring to drive-thrus. If the name isn’t enough of a dead giveaway, the idea of a drive-thru is simple: It’s a fast-food service where restaurants get your order to you in less time and without you ever having to leave your car. Usually, there’s an outlet with a server to take care of your order and hand the food to you through the window of your parked car. You get a whole meal and go on your jolly way in minutes — ideally.
Like most initiatives born out of an overarching need for all-round convenience, drive-thrus originated in — naturally — the United States. These restaurants have gotten so much more popular since the 90s that there are now drive-through options for just about everything, even marriages and funerals.
The popularity of drive-thrus has travelled far beyond the shores of the US to a lot of other countries; surprisingly though, in nearly one hundred years, this idea still hasn’t quite taken off as much as you would think in Lagos, our own epicentre of all global fads. Granted, we have the KFC and Road Chef branches with the drive-thru option, but they’re really only a handful when you think about it. So why isn’t the drive-thru culture working here?
Fundamentally, it’s an issue of cultural and environmental differences on many levels — the first of which is the traffic dilemma. Lagos is unbearably hot, often unforgiving, and constantly buzzing. The numbers say that the average Lagosian spends 30 hours a week — 6 hours most working days — on the road. We get up as early as 4am trying to cut down our traffic time and keep ourselves in a job, while braving the world’s biggest hub of insanity. Stopping to grab some food at a restaurant in the middle of all of that means the promise of (hopefully) less chaos, perhaps a little music in the background and the all-important air conditioning. Not a lot of us want to skip that to get served food in the same car we’ve spent 75% of the working day in.
Second: The money culture. An average fast-food meal in Nigeria costs around $3; against the American minimum wage of $1,160 per month, that’s 0.2%. Maybe not too bad for the average citizen of the drive-thru capital. The Nigerian minimum wage, on the other hand, is about $40. On that salary, it’s certainly challenging to allocate funds to regular fast-food meals (if at all); it’s an experience that costs 8% of your monthly pay. For that large a fraction, you’ve got to get the whole experience.
Third: We’ve got the time factor to deal with. From Road Chef to KFC, there’s one constant complaint — slow, sloppy service. Draggy service is a plague with Nigerian restaurants that we’ve come to live with, but the other perks of eating out help make up for the time-lapse. A drive-thru, however, is designed exclusively for fast food, and when service isn’t, well, that, customers in hot cars get grumpy pretty quickly.
It’s a combination of these factors that make it a bit more difficult for drive-thrus to thrive in Lagos or for businesses to even be inclined to offer the service. Will it always be like this? Most certainly not. As the nature of work, life, transportation and the economy change, so will restaurant culture. But in the meantime, park your car quietly and walk into the store to get your potentially mid Chickwizz meal — or stick to deliveries. Selah.
Miracle Kati is a medical student, writer and small-town activist. She loves food adventures and daring to try everything edible from anywhere. I mean — what’s the worst that could happen?