Columnist Susan Snyder: No idle thoughts at drive-thru

Friday, March 2, 2001 | 1:34 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column also appears Tuesdays and Fridays in the Las Vegas Sun. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Nothing says, "Your guardian angel is a buzzard" like a drive-thru window.

You're 15 minutes late for work. You've had no coffee. And it's raining so hard your pets are assembling in pairs. In a moment of desperation you pull into a (Insert name of Large Coffee Chain With Many Lawyers) drive-thru to grab a no-frills cup of joe.

Silly goose. As soon as you're corralled by the idiot curbs, you realize you're stuck behind some suck-up ordering decaf-skinny-mocha-carmel-frappy-crappies for the entire office.

The blender whirs somewhere inside. Your boss grrrrs somewhere across town. And you gaze longingly at the parking lot that is virtually empty. It would have been faster to ...

Naaaah, forget it. Drive-Thru R Us.

Nobody does drive-thru like we do.

We can go to the bank. Buy a six-pack of beer. Drop off the dry cleaning and pick it up later.

We can fill our prescriptions and fill our tummies with everything from tacos to egg rolls to french fries to chicken or burgers. Thank In-N-Out Burger for the latter. Its owners introduced drive-thru service when they opened the first one in Los Angeles in 1948.

Here in Las Vegas, you can get an In-N-Out Burger on your way to pick up some building supplies at the Payless Cashways drive-thru lumberyard.

"You just drive through and pick out what you want, then take the tags to the cashier," said Kristine Gilbert, who works in the office of the Payless on South Decatur Boulevard.

It's not a total driver-seat experience. Customers still have to go inside the store to pay.

"They did used to have it where you paid outside, but it got too congested," Gilbert said.

See? We loved that drive-thru to death.

Pay the power bill, the gas bill, the phone bill. Drop off the library books, the mail, the videos you rented over the weekend.

We even wager in the drive-thru.

Take a gamble on love at the Little White Wedding Chapel's Tunnel of Love. Or hedge your bets on your favorite sporting event at the Imperial Palace's drive-thru race and sports book. It has two windows.

"Usually we'll get a line right before game time," Jackson Meeker, one of the supervisors, said. "By 9 (a.m.) during football season it really starts packing up. Generally it's mostly locals. They don't want to have to get out and go into the casino."

About the only thing we don't have -- as far as I could determine -- is a drive-thru strip club. Pennsylvania has one, according to an Associated Press report from last year.

The club sits about 35 miles east of Pittsburgh and charges $5 a minute to watch a nude woman dance at the drive-thru window.

Wonder how you'd zone that.

Regular or super size?

Mississippi reportedly has a drive-thru funeral home, and Daytona Beach, Fla., once had a drive-thru church.

Las Vegas Valley motorists can get the blessing of smog-check machines without getting out of the car.

And wouldn't it be cool if the Department of Motor Vehicles had a drive-thru, too? You could get the smog check and register the car without unbuckling a seat belt.

But show up with a full tank of gas -- just in case. That old buzzard seems partial to the DMV.