Ronald McDonald will no longer gaze out the window overlooking Foothill Boulevard as a result of the decades-old drive-thru ban in San Luis Obispo. The McDonald’s closed last Thursday after four decades of serving the San Luis Obispo community and is scheduled to be demolished at an unsettled date.
“Fast food means you don’t want to get out of your car,” Chris Ujano an area supervisor for McDonald’s, said. “You’re on the go, you want to get something to eat and get on your way.”
The director of operations at four McDonald’s restaurants in San Luis Obispo County, Bob Bedard said that he went to the city council last year to lobby to end to the ban. Despite Bedard’s efforts, the ordinance was upheld in a 3-2 vote.
The lease for the property that Bedard directed across from Albertsons was up for renewal, and the building, which was built in 1968, was in need of a remodel. Part of the McDonald’s’ remodel plan was to open a drive-thru. However, since the mid-1980’s, San Luis Obispo has had an ordinance that bans them in the city.
Without a drive-thru window, it just wasn’t economically feasible to do the remodel, Bedard said. “If the city council would have let us put in a drive-thru, or at least entertained the thought, we would have remodeled,” he said. “We would have stayed open for another forty years. We can’t build a million-dollar McDonald’s and not have a drive thru. We just can’t do it.”
Bedard said that other McDonald’s drive-thru locations in San Luis Obispo County sales from the window account for at least 50 and up to 70 percent of sales at those locations.
Larry Smyth, a realtor for Farrell Smyth, who manages the property said he didn’t even stay on location to eat, even without the window. “I don’t stay there. I might just take it to my car and eat.”
Part of the argument for drive-thrus in San Luis Obispo given by Bedard, is that there is a certain expectation with fast food: that it is mostly to go and people will avoid it or go somewhere else if they have to get out of their cars.
The city refuted that people in San Luis Obispo expect drive-thrus and said that if a general consensus from the San Luis Obispo community came along, they would entertain changing the ordinance. So far, there has been no such public push for an overturn of the ordinance, Doug Davidson, deputy director of community development said.
“People in the community don’t expect drive-thus here,” Davidson said. “That’s because we’ve had the ban for 25 years.”
Davidson gave several reasons for the ban, including pedestrian walking flow, traffic congestion, the “nice” Cal Poly community and fewer emissions from cars idling while waiting in line.
Both Bedard and the franchise owner of Burger King, Mike Humerian stressed that other drive-thrus do exist in San Luis Obispo; they just don’t happen to be restaurants.
Rabobank on Broad St. has a three lane drive thru. Bedard and Humerian both found this hypocritical.
“We can push cars through faster than they can,” Humerian said, stating that it takes them two to three minutes to serve a vehicle while the bank can take five to seven.
Humerian says he would love to have a drive-thru. “There’s no question about the business difference with a drive-thru,” he said. “On average, those stores do 20-30 percent more in yearly sales.”
Humerian said the ban is “hogwash,” and that it is just an excuse for the city to portray itself as a mellow, slow-paced town.
Keith Handley, owner/operator of the McDonald’s location, could not be reached for comment.