Bloke rolls up to KFC drive-thru riding horse-drawn cart only to be told: Neigh Wheezing Brits' neck rolls up and down the country quivered with delight this week as American fast-food chains were among the first businesses to emerge from the UK's coronavirus lockdown – but future coronary patients are only to be served from the safety of their cars. If this hack's undisclosed location in the southeast of …
"I was humiliated...."
How day making would it be to see someone crying HARD on a carriage in a drive through...? The visuals of that, I'm Lovin' It.
"...to welcome him back in the near future."
Are future vehicles like bicycles allowed, or are they discriminating because he doesn't have a double-drawn carriage... yet?
"all vehicles must be taxed and insured and therefore cycles were not allowed"
While it's not a legal requirement, it is entirely possible for a cyclist to be insured. Arguably quite sensible in fact, and one of the main reasons for joining organisations like Cycling UK (née CTC). And cyclists generally pay all taxes owed; the same amount paid by other low-emission vehicles like electric cars. So do Costa allow all vehicles if the owner can show the correct documentation, or are they just lying about why they don't want to serve certain vehicles?
What lovely state/locale are you in, where that is followed and/or enforced?
Round these parts, we have the "Horse and Diaper" regulations, but all equine powered transport systems tend to just leave a few piles per mile and never clean it up.
Lovely when the person in a brodozer in the 55 zone hits one and splays it all over your vehicle...
Bzzzzt, wrong.
I take issue with the piles of excrement in the road, because hitting it at 55 makes a mess.
Don't have an issue with the smell of natural fertilizer, church bells, fire horn, cicadas, or the peeper frogs.
Think of it as if someone's dog continually dropped a log on the sidewalk in front of your house, and the owners didn't clean it up. That's the annoyance level.
Pints all round.
Prior to the present situation (and hopefully again afterwards) our community shop and cafe in delightful mid-Wales gets regular visits from a company that organises pony-trekking in our beautful countryside (visitors welcome - LATER). They turn up with 8 or 10 horses and stop off for tea and carrots before going off to the beach for a gallop through the surf.
I can assure you from personal experience that cleaning up the horse shit isn't too bad if it's done quickly. After a car has driven through it and it has rained it's messier.
Our new building actually has a couple of hitching rails in the car park, especially for them!
"The drive-thru windows never closed here ( south of Nashville, TN), so it's just never been a problem."
I'm not sure why they closed here, Maybe for a short while at the start of lock-down while they got sorted out with protection processes and staffing levels, but as a takeaway they were allowed to remain open. All the non-chain takeaways did such as pizza shops, fish'n'chip shop, curry shops etc.
I've never been much interested in burgers, even before there was a McDonald's on every damn corner, so have never consumed any of their "offerings" (though I have been inside their premises occasionally in the company of others who did partake). I'm much more partial to pizza, though I'm aware that's almost certainly even worse for me in health terms.
Indeed, thinking about it, I wonder what the effect on the nations' waistlines might have been had the government instructed all takeaway food outlets to close for the duration of the lockdown! (I know I'd have eaten less pizza, for a start)
Why not jam and peanut butter on a pizza? A pizza is just an open-faced sandwich, when you boil it down to basics.
But don't take my word for it. Ask your pre-teen if he/she would like a PB&J pizza. Better, ask 'em if they would like to help you make PB&J pizzas. It's easy, simply make your dough as usual, spread with your fruit preserve of choice, and bake as you would any other pizza. Pull it out and spread with peanut butter. Serve. (Baking the peanut butter runs the risk of burning, and it comes out of the oven somewhat similar to very runny napalm.) When my kid was pre-teen, she loved helping me make this rather easy variation on the theme.
Yep. And we are getting all the discarded Big Mac boxes thrown from cars as well. It was bliss without their trash polluting the world for a few months.
Around here, the numpties in the McD's queue were taking an hour and a half to get served. They were also blocking the entrance to the KFC next door.
I've only had one Big Mac. One was enough to make me decide that the box probably tasted better than what was suposedly food that it contained.
That was 1977 while I was on holiday in New York.
On the one occasion I ventured into a McD and ordered a double cheese burger I was told I can't have one as they were still serving the breakfast menu... so I bought a cheese burger from a van on the market place outside. Jolly nice it was too, and cheaper.
more mike (Pork) Sausage Egg McMuffin... And, you cant get that anymore in the largly diversivly ran McDonalds anymore. I guess it must have been to offensive of something? So Mc-e-dezz is like the place of last resort for me.
"the safety of our guests is really important, so we can't allow horse-drawn vehicles in our drive-thrus."
Did they offer any explanation as to why the safety of their "guests" would be impacted by a horse-drawn vehicle?
Some say the horse shit, but is steaming recycled grass any worse than diesel & petrol fumes spewing out as they queue for an hour?
I'm sure it is all caused by relativism. Let me explain:
Being hit with a blazing fast car will only distort time, ensure certain death and be over in a jiffie and is therefore safe for all intends and purposes. Being grazed by a gentle horse with the mass of a black hole will both distort time, space and cause the burger pusher to celebrate the event for an overly long and prolonged time-dilated period and the burgers will become spaghetti-fied in the process of being in the vicinity of the massive but gentle horse.
So, car: safe, horse: danger.
One day, well over two decades back, I decided to go for a milkshake. It was a fairly warm day, dry and somewhat dusty, and I had just helped fix up the moto trials terrain with some other members of the club, so some cold refreshment was in order. My transport was an East-German sidecar rig[0], with the awesome power of seventeen horses propelling it forward. Somewhat.
So I rode up to the intercom, ordered the shake, and proceeded to the till.
"We can't serve you, you're on a motorcycle."
Technically, that would be true. However, the contraption has three wheels[1]; and allows me to just sit on it without further effort to keep it balanced when stationary. Neither would I be hindered in reaching for my wallet, or the consumption, nor would I have no way to ride off except with the shake awkwardly jammed between my thighs, instead having ample room to take several dozen milkshakes with me if I had had that urge. This I conveyed to the cashier in words with as few syllables as feasible.
"We can't serve you, you're on a motorcycle.". This was by some sort of supervisor.
So, apparently their collective IQ was roughly that of one of their salads, and with a warm and heart-felt "fuck you" I rode off to visit the Italian ice-cream parlour in the city centre, Which I should have opted for in the first place, except that it was a bit awkward to reach as I'd have to negotiate a couple of traffic access controls to get there.
I haven't dealt with them ever since.
[0] with a transport tub instead of a conventional passenger sidecar, quite suitable as a replacement for a car boot. In fact, I had just delivered one and a half railway sleeper to the terrain to be used as obstacles.
[1] about as much as a Reliant Robin has, although those are decidedly less stable.
Does it ACTUALLY matter if you are sitting in a horse and cart, a Mercedes, a motorcycle, a bicycle or even just standing amongst a line of cars because you want your junk/comfort food and the counter is closed because of coronavirus? Is this because the restaurants want to maintain a certain level of cleanliness, and they don't want the horse to sprinkle manure on the drivethru pavement?
No idea. There was a McDonald's and a Del Taco in Orlando (Florida) that didn't serve motorcycles in the drive-thru. That's ok, we just got 50-odd bikers together and filled the parking lot for a couple hours, and miraculously they changed their policy. We sent one guy in at a time to get a sandwich so we weren't loitering, we were just waiting to get food.
I've also seen places refuse to serve people on bicycles.
However, in Pennsylvania the Amish will not drive cars, so their horse-drawn buggies are seen (and accepted) everywhere. It's part of their religion, so if you refused horses, you'd have a civil-rights discrimination lawyer on your doorstep in a heartbeat. They live for that stuff.
Shirley you can find somewhere better to eat in Orlando ... Oh, wait, what am I saying?
You were all on two wheels, with the odd trike no doubt ... Shirley you could go somewhere else (anywhere else) to get a bite to eat?
I normally avoid Costa. But in these days when nicer cafes are shut it would still be nice to have something hot and vaguely sharing a name with coffee when out on a long ride (on a bicycle, not a horse). But we too are banned from their drive-thrus.
It's elf & safety apparently. We constitute a greater danger to them and their other clients than folks in cars. And I thought it was the other way round. Silly me!
Quite honestly, it's so the idiots in cages don't run into you while you are in line. Applies to everything with fewer than three wheels or powered by humans. Same thing's true here in California.
I can take my buckboard through the drive-through (four wheels, not people powered), but in theory I can't take the trap through (two wheels, not people powered). My wife's big Harley is not allowed, but the foreman's wife's Tri-Hawk is. Skateboards, blades, and rollerskates are not allowed (more than two wheels, but people powered). Etc. Basically, they think they are protecting us from ourselves, as usual.
>Basically, they think they are protecting us from ourselves, as usual.
Nope. that should read 'the Lawyers are trying to protect them from frivolous lawsuits'
Maccy D and 'hot coffee' spring to mind. No matter how sensible a company is, there is always someone who will file a claim. 'I got food poisoning and nearly died because there was horseshit outside my Macky Dees'.The B Ark isn't just for telephone sanitisers..........
I am unable to answer your question but what I can tell you, is when I kept horses on the UK, a bunch of us used to go for a good pre-lunch Sunday ride.
One of the routes used to take us past a Little Chef, so when on that route we would have lunch there, the manageress always welcomed us, not because she particularly liked horsesbut the 5 or 6 horses tethered outside always pulled the punters in .
Little Chef, a part of my childhood there when travelling & in teenage years, our group of motorcyclists stopping in one (Usually at the top of Telegraph Hill), burgers & chips with pancakes & ice-cream to follow.
Icon - Getting me Belstaff.
> Is this because the restaurants want to maintain a certain level of cleanliness, and they don't want the horse to sprinkle manure on the drivethru pavement?
That might be the case but I would have thought that that issue was rather academic once they had actually reached the order window.
Most likely the robot at the window was told that only car-based people can be served and they took it rather more literally than common-sense would dictate.
It's the insurance isn't it. The more baffling rules I come across, the more the real reason for them turns out to be "lawyers".
The Mercedes in your list will have number-plates, and (the "restaurant" is entitled to assume) insurance. As they are on private land, the restaurant's insurance provider has some liability for accidents. If one does occur, say between vehicles, then they just need to grab the CCTV footage, read off the numberplates, and cook up a deal between the various insurers.
A horse-and-cart, bicycle or pedestrian waiting in line isn't identifiable (and isn't required to have insurance). Motorcycles don't have front number-plates, so this probably tells you which way the CCTV is facing in the queue. In case of an accident, they could quickly exit stage left, and the restaurant's insurer would lose out.
I don't recall seeing number-plates on mobility scooters, even on ones which can go on-road. Perhaps they fall into the same trap as motorcycles, even though the article notes that at least some users have insurance. A cyclist with liability insurance (it exists) may also be able to argue that they should be allowed through. Although the number of cyclists keen enough to get insurance, and self-loathing enough to eat Mcdonalds, is probably rather small.
My 89 year old aunt has just been sent from hospital to die at home from heart failure. Due to Covid we haven't been able to visit but my cousin drove her by so we could wave goodbye. She said she is looking forward to two things, sleeping in her own bed without someone sitting on it (apparently a dementia patient on her ward) and a fish supper.
I'm vegetarian but I would die for fish and chips now.
Folk are crazy, increasingly crazy. When the local McD's reopened the queues jammed up the town centre. Before that when the local dump reopened the queues jammed a main arterial A road into Edinburgh. Hold your horses - no offence Jon Jon.
Here in the U.S. the drive-thrus at restaurants have been open all through the lockdown. It's the counters and dining rooms that have been closed. So we haven't had an forced fast food deprivation and sudden relaxation that creates traffic artery clogging in search of circulatory artery clogging.
Folk are crazy, increasingly crazy. Folk are stupid, increasingly stupid.
Sitting in a car for an hour for a burger? You could walk to a supermarket, buy all the ingredients and cook a burger from scratch in less time. It would be tastier too, and the walk would be of some benefit too.
But the pillocks who toss rubbish out of their windows are probably too thick to use a fork, which might explain a lot. Bring back home economics in schools I say!
"Sitting in a car for an hour for a burger? You could walk to a supermarket, buy all the ingredients and cook a burger from scratch in less time"
Yep, took the kids and wife to md's at the weekend as it was next to where we were going and they wanted a treat.
£18.54 later and I could not shake the thought that only a week earlier I had brought some fillet steak, Tom's , potatoes and wine from the farm shop for around the same money.
I understand the convenience in some situations but to go out of your way to buy it just doesn't add up.
Already missing the quiet lockdown roads
Getting all the parts and cooking it for a family of four would also be cheaper than the drive-through. I can't believe how many people world-wide consider such places a valid form of nutrition ... the poor bastards are getting taken six ways from Sunday. And now the idiots are waiting upwards of an hour and a half to get fleeced? The mind boggles ...
A good burger is a fine, occasional, treat. Which rules out MacD (but Burgerking aren't too bad) - but queuing for an hour for one?
I actually had my first burger in 12 weeks last week from our local Kebab house in Machynlleth. No one hour queue. No queue. They have a table at the front door, you wander up and shout your order then wander away for 5 mins. Then they pop your order on the table and you pay with contactless. Easy (and safe). I'm sure many independents are doing the same.
> A good burger is a fine, occasional, treat.
Too true - I still remember a nice cheeseburger from half a decade ago, made with fresh, locally sourced ingredients, including Angus beef, served with homemade fries and a salad of the same top quality.
These days kebab shops usually provide the best quality concerning fast food at affordable prices.
One of my then local kebab shops used to sell, well, I'm not quite sure if they were exactly roast potatoes, but they were sort of similar. Deliciously fluffy and (I'm hoping) a bit healthier than chips, it was a favourite post-pub nosh for me (even better with a bit of grated cheese when you got home). Unfortunately, I moved to another part of town, and the last time I went back there, they had stopped selling them, sadly.
I'm sure many independents are doing the same.
Quite. There's an excellent burgers[0] & pancakes restaurant right at the border with Germany here; they've been open for takeaway that way, except for the first few days of the lockdown I think. With the easing, and current weather cooperating, they're now allowed to use their considerable outdoor seating area.
[0] beef, fish and veggie.
Confused...
Would that be Trigger, the star of TV Westerns? Or Trigger with his broom (helping sweep up the mess left by the former Trigger )?
I suppose the comment works despite the ambiguity...
*The coat? Like the earlier commentard at the Little Chef, Telegraph Hill, it's a Belstaff . In my case it used to be The Wimpey kiosk on Cannock Chase: better burgers!
Now you have me nostalgic for a Wimpy burger with ketchup & the finally diced onion, I always try to seek one out when I am back in the UK & or a roadside diner that has Westlers hot dogs boiling away (Another guilty pleasure because mum wouldn't let me have one when taking me to the Odeon).
here in Canadaland, Harveys has a similar logo to Wimpy's in blue, the onion is cut chunkier & alas the burger uninspiring.
"Would that be Trigger, the star of TV Westerns? Or Trigger with his broom
That would be Trigger who "pulled the fastest milk cart in the west"
I get how it might be odd in the UK, but there are places that this wouldn't be all that unusual like Lancaster in PA or parts of Farmington in NM. In Lancaster they actually have pretty serious problems with the Amish drinking too much (they may not have much technology but they do like to drink) and getting into buggy accidents after passing out behind the reins. A few people die a year from it as a matter of fact.
[...] getting into buggy accidents after passing out behind the reins."
In British rural areas going to the pub with horse transport was once considered essential. The horse could find its way home afterwards without any input from an inebriated driver.
There were the days when a horse and cart made daily household deliveries. The horse could be trusted to keep re-positioning itself along the street - while the driver just ferried the goods to the doorsteps.
My grandfather was a roundsman for Lyon's Tea Houses in London, and drove a horse drawn four wheeled van. His horse, Pimple, knew the round so well that Grandpa never had to climb aboard, he would just whistle and Pimple would move on to the next drop. The only trouble came towards the end of the round, Pimple would be so eager to get back to his nosebag that he wouldn't wait for the command, but would take off on his own, leaving Grandpa to follow on foot. Grandpa used to have to tie the reins to a lamp post if he wanted a ride back to base. Then he was issued with a motor van, which kept breaking down in embarassing places, like at the top of Pentonville Hill, just near The Angel, Islington on a Saturday lunchtime.
My Finnish Swedish-speaking friends from Åbo corrected me when I said in my best Stockholm Swedish "Shall we drive?" (Ska vi fara) - in their usage you say "Shall we ride?" (Ska vi åka).
Here is an academic paper covering the distinctions in several languages.
I do a part time delivery job for a well known take away firm, and we recently "partnered" with Uber Eats, right at the peak of the lockdown-induced rush.
So here's what happens. Something pops up on a device telling us the order and the ETA of the driver. Except, that the driver might not actually turn up for hours, if at all. Often, food goes in the bin and the customer gets a refund. To circumvent the situation where customers end up with cold food, we now prepare the food but don't cook it until the driver arrives.
This of course, just pushes the frustration onto the drivers. So in turn, they now press the button that tells us they've "arrived" when in fact they haven't.
This is the problem with Uber, it's not a coherent organization, it's just an app that attempts to stitch together different organisations and individuals in an ad-hoc way. As a company they take no responsibility for the ensuing chaos, the wellfair of their "self employed" employees, the integrity of said people or the wellbeing or concerns of their customers (as has been proven time and again with Uber taxis).
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At Kentucky Fried Colt you cannot bolt to the finish line. At Mad Cow Donald's horses are permitted to be ON the menu and at the drive-thru.
This helps to ensure the Mad'CD's customers in the neigh-borhood have a stable diet. Their straw-poll of customers confirmed it. Nay-question no 4 faults on their part.
"For everyone's safety, our restaurant team were checking that mobility scooters were permitted in the Drive Thru lane and, due to its road-going nature, in this case it was."
Safety? Huh? What, did you think it was going to explode? It's an electric scooter for heaven's sake. It's a Nissan Leaf with less bodywork.
It seems all the stories about brain cells being outlawed at McDonalds recruitment drives are true.
On behalf of all Americans, I apologize for the way our fast food industry has infected the planet.
Had been weaning myself off of fake food anyway, but after seeing Michael Keaton's excellent portrayal of early Ray Croc in "The Founder", have stopped visiting that type of establishment.
If I can't cook it, or be served an actual, metal fork with my meal, I'm not a customer.
In the early 70's we moved from Chicago to a small town around an hour away. (Funny that dad wanted to get away from the "dangerous" city of our births, but we ended up in, shall we say, a real "family" town that used to be the summer getaway for folks in the Capone era. Go figure. The town was actually quite safe, so long as you "followed the rules".)
The area was just full of lakes. A new Burger King went in, and yes, they had a boat-through for folks that couldn't be bothered to actually come inside for their heart-stopping-good "meals".
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