3 Trends Set to Shape Daily Life in a Post-Covid World

Photograph by Alex Wong

As we shelter in place, life adapts to our need to stay at home. What businesses and services are turning this sharp curve in ways that deserves notice? A post-covid world will want to expand and advance its most effective adaptations. Here’s a look at three points of sale keeping pace with a world on lockdown.

1. The Drive-Thru

Suprisingly, McDonald’s was not the first to make popular the Drive-Thru restaurant and did not get in on the Drive-Thru scene until the 1970s. Drive-Thrus evolved from the pick-up window and from restaurants delivering food to parked cars as far back as the 1930s. Popular early Drive-Thrus: The Pig Stand in Texas in 1931, In & Out Burger in California in the late 1940s. Wendy’s entered the scene in the 1970s. Drive-Thrus appealed to the new rapid need for affordable food that saved on time as much as dollars.

Photograph by Michelle Henders

These days businesses such as Starbucks and Walgreens, and many banks have already modeled from fast food joints to offer Drive-Thru windows for their goods. In a world where a viral outbreak is a constant personal vulnerability and a public health crisis, businesses that can deliver services or goods with minimal contact will prove more and more desirable. What other services could experience a drive-thru revision? Government agencies where you once waited in long lines at tall busy office buildings downtown could begin to offer services thru a Drive-Thru window. Could nail or hair salons where services were provided thru a minimal contact window be a possibility? Clothes stores or bookstores where you drove up to the first window to view the inventory on a screen and then made your selection at the next window might be the new shopping experience for many Americans.

In a 2013 article on Drive-Thru performance in QSR magazine, experts weighed in on the increasing demands for speed to compete on the Drive-Thru scene. In a post-covid world, businesses that…