From the drive-thru to the digital model: How decades of store redesigns changed the way people shop and eat

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Most people can’t recall the first time they used a drive-thru, pulled into a curbside pickup spot, or tapped through a self-checkout screen. The biggest movements in how Americans shop and eat rarely feel like milestones when they happen. They become the new normal, one renovated store or restaurant at a time. Together, the last several decades of retail and restaurant design tell a clear story, and much of it happened in the construction most customers never think about. Here, Sevan Multi-Site Solutions looks back at the last few decades and what changes they brought. 

The Drive-Thru Made Fast Food Actually Fast

Before the drive-thru became the standard at fast-food restaurants in the 1970s and ‘80s, getting dinner on the way home meant parking, walking in, and waiting at the counter. The drive-thru window changed the basic promise of fast food: You never had to leave your car. It also set an expectation of speed and consistency that consumers came to expect as part of their everyday lives.

Self-Checkout Promised Speed, With Mixed Reviews

By the 2000s, self-checkout lanes had become a fixture in grocery and big-box stores. Consumer opinion has always been split. Some shoppers love scanning their own items, while others curse the machine waiting to clear an “unexpected item in bagging area” error. As Accenture notes, self-checkout was an early example of stores redesigning the customer’s path around technology, not just around shelves and aisles.

BOPIS Turned the Parking Lot into Part of the Store

The most significant recent shift came with buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), which moved from a luxury to a near-necessity across the 2010s, and especially during the pandemic. A customer could order from the couch and be in and out of a parking lot in minutes. Restaurants changed too, adding dedicated shelves and pickup windows for mobile and delivery orders that the original building layouts never accounted for.

Few customers noticed the construction behind that shift, but it was extensive. For example, Chipotle added digital order pickup shelves at more than 1,100 restaurants and new digital make-lines at hundreds more, all installed in three to five days. For customers, that speed meant a restaurant stayed open and functional instead of going dark for a longer renovation.

The point is for customers to notice the new pickup shelf, not the construction that put it there. When restaurants can be updated over a weekend instead of closing for a week, the guest experience doesn’t miss a beat. That’s where the planning up front pays off for both the owner and customer.

The Renovations Consumers Never Noticed, On Purpose

That focus on speed points to a wider change happening out of sight: the technology teams use to plan renovations. Retailers and restaurants increasingly depend on 3D laser scanning and digital modeling to map a building before any work begins. This catches problems like a pipe in an unexpected place or a wall that doesn’t match the old blueprints before they become delays.

For customers, the payoff is invisible by design. The retail store reopens on schedule instead of sitting wrapped in construction plastic for an extra month, or a restaurant that adds an ordering kiosk over a weekend instead of closing for a week.

What’s Coming Next for Shoppers

A few changes are likely to feel just as familiar. According to a 2026 report by McKinsey, stores are shrinking as brands lean into smaller-footprint formats, fueling more “store-in-store” setups, like a beauty counter or coffee shop housed inside a larger box retail store, that give shoppers more variety in a single stop. Parking lots are getting busier and more purposeful, with dedicated pickup lanes now standard at many chains. And EV charging, once found mostly at gas stations, is starting to appear at restaurants, shopping centers, and medical offices, letting drivers charge while they’re already parked. 

None of these will feel like a big deal in the moment. It’s just a slightly different parking spot, a new pickup shelf, a charger by the door. But that’s how nearly every change in how Americans shop and eat has arrived: one renovated location at a time, until the old way is the thing nobody can quite remember.

This story was produced by Sevan Multi-Site Solutions and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.