Phoenix is the ultimate drive-thru town. In fact, Arizona was home to the very first McDonald’s drive-thru in 1975 in Sierra Vista.
Now, they are everywhere, from the Starbucks shift to almost all drive-thrus, to the Dutch Bros phenomenon and newfound popularity of Salad & Go, and, of course, there are your fast-food joints, drive-up grocery pick-up and a few, very special drive-thru liquor stores left. The pandemic, of course, kicked all of this into high gear.
And it's understandable. They’re easier, they’re faster, you don’t have to get out of your car in this summer heat — the list goes on. But, we wondered: Is there also something lost in all of this convenience?
The Show turned to someone who knows a lot about communication — Sarah Tracy, Ph.D., the director of the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University, .
She said that there are two parts to communicating: the task at hand and the relationship behind it.
Full conversation
SARAH TRACY: The thing that comes to mind is that more and more we have these ways to communicate that focuses on the task of communication, but it leaves out a lot of the richness of the relationship that we can get when we are interacting with people and in an embodied way.
LAUREN GILGER: Tell us more about that. Like, what do you think is lost in that? Like, when we don't have this kind of face to face opportunity for communication?
TRACY: Yeah, so in our communication 101 classes, we teach that communication has both the task and the relationship part. The relationship part is the social connection that we get. So if we order online or if we order it through a drive-thru, it might actually be even better at the task than if we are with the person and we are flirting or chatting and laughing and joking and so on, but we miss all of that feeling of connection with others, which really gives us a lot of happiness and it actually is also connected to our health.
GILGER: Interesting. How is it connected to our health? It sounds like there's been research on that.
TRACY: Yeah, I teach a course at ASU called Communication and the Art of Happiness. And when we look at the happiest people in the world, they are people that have rich social lives. They surround themselves not only with those close ties, like family members, but also interact regularly with the community of others. And so when we reduce how much we have in terms of community connection, and when I say they're happier, they're also healthiest. And so this does make a difference in terms of our physical and our mental well-being.
GILGER: It almost is like the, the, the meet cute thing that happens in romantic comedies. That can't happen in a drive-thru in the same way, right?
TRACY: Right. And you know, when we reduce being able to interact with people as full people and it's just focused on, does this pizza have the right toppings? Does my coffee have the right number of shots of coffee in it? That's no longer there.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. So we're also in this moment, Sarah, in which our society, I think, is more divisive than it has been, at least in a long time. There seems to be pretty good agreement on that politically and and culturally as well, like the divisions are more apparent. Do you think this kind of thing, this kind of isolation in our cars, on our phones, waiting in a drive-thru line as opposed to having to be with real people inside a store, for example, does that contribute to this?
TRACY: It certainly can. I spent some of the summer in London, and every day I was literally physically rubbing up to other people like on the sidewalk or brushing their arm or being nearby them when I'm in the Tube and so on. And it reminds us that even if somebody, for instance, is reading a book or has a magazine that has a different political ideology, we all have something in common and we're all able to see how we need to work with one another in order to do something, even if it's as simple as how do we work together to get into this elevator or to get where we need to go in peace.
And if you think about cars and the way that we interact with people in cars in Phoenix, a lot of people interact with cars as though they are things rather than actually people. And so we can engage in behavior that we would never engage with if we had to see another person's expression. And I sometimes think about times where someone might be really aggressive on the roadway, but then once they catch up with someone at a stoplight, they're embarrassed to look at the other person. And it's because all of a sudden they're like, oh my goodness, I actually acted in a way that I wouldn't want to act if I had to see their face.
GILGER: Right? It like strips away the humanity in a way.
TRACY: Yeah, yeah, they're just like little bombs on the freeway rather than people.
GILGER: So we're being very negative about this, I feel. Is there anything that's gained in this? Like, is there maybe an opportunity to find this community in different ways or in a different kind of setting?
TRACY: Yeah, sure, of course. So one of the things that is important to realize is that mediated communication, whether it's at the drive-thru or whether it's online or whatever, that is not an enemy, but it is, it's a tension that we're in where we need to think about what is it that I'm able to get from this venue of communicating and what is missing from it. And so oftentimes the task can be done more efficiently, with less, you know, transportation costs and so on because we're able to talk online, talk from afar, etc.
But if you find yourself in a space where you're feeling unconnected or you're feeling increasingly divided or lonely, I would recommend that you take a look at the venues of your conversations and communication and the balance of them. Are there ways that you can take a walk and actually see other people. It doesn't make sense to knock on your neighbor's door rather than texting them when you have a message for them.
GILGER: Forcing yourself almost to be in situations where you'll physically see other people feels fair. So you mentioned something about loneliness. Tell me a little bit about how that might connect and how being in our cars or just sort of separated from each other physically could contribute to that kind of thing.
TRACY: Sure. Well, loneliness is a key part of suffering, and most people do not clearly communicate that they're suffering when they are in mediated spaces in a real literal way. The way that we recognize that people are suffering typically is through emotional leakage through their nonverbals. So we see someone and we're able to notice that they're suffering, and it's through that that we're able then to reach out and actually practice some compassion.
And when we think about, for instance, not only this topic that we're talking about the car culture, but also the effects of COVID, it's no wonder that there were more suffering people, more loneliness, and so on because we literally just did not know and we we cannot know as well that somebody is hurting when we're not with them. And if we don't know that they're hurting, it's harder for us to practice compassion.
GILGER: Will there, do you think, Sarah, be a backlash to this? Like, do you anticipate our societies becoming more and more insular in this way and finding more and more ways to maybe break out of that and, and maybe finding some cool new things that come out of that?
TRACY: Possibly. I, I'm hopeful that there are people that are more and more realizing some of the things that they're missing when they don't have that embodied communication. However, we do tend to go with the the thing that seems most immediately easy, and the lack of friction with other people in terms of ordering food, in terms of not having to deal with the emotional fallout of sending a certain text message like we might have to if we were face to face, it can be very tempting.
And so what I try to do when I'm teaching students at ASU about this is really to help them understand through doing activities where they are in conversation and they journal about it, and they are able to better realize, like, wow, this actually brought me a lot of happiness and a lot of connection and so on, by doing these activities that they might, their default might be to do it in a mediated way, to do it in a more embodied way.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Sarah Tracy's name.
