Grady Sturdivant is a small-town guy. His Friendly Barber Shop on Main Street looks pretty much the way it must have when he opened it in 1961. The silver-haired Sturdivant wears an old-fashioned white smock with his name embroidered on it. He still dispenses hot lather and uses a straight razor to shave your neck. All for $9.
But Carrboro, a former textile mill town, is now a trendy community in the booming Research Triangle, and it's taking the small-town thing a bit too far, the 64-year-old barber says."I think it's a very stupid thing to do," he says. The "thing" is the town council's recent vote to ban new drive-through businesses downtown. The reasoning behind the June 9 vote: To preserve Carrboro's "village" feel.
"That's kid talk," Sturdivant says between snips. "You can't stop progress."
But if the drive-through - or "drive-thru," as it's often spelled - represents the path to progress, Carrboro's not the only town looking to change lanes.
In 1996, Sierra Madre, Calif., officials put the kibosh on new drive-through restaurants to cut down on noise, light and traffic. This spring, the swallows returned to San Juan Capistrano, but any plans for new drive-ups in the historic California town went south.
Now, Atlanta City Councilman Lee Morris is proposing to halt McDonald's march to the sea. He explains his reasons for a proposal to stop issuing drive-through permits: Less pollution from idling cars and more exercise for customers, who'd have to get out of their cars for their "Super-size" fries.
To Ron Fennel, senior vice president of the Georgia Hospitality & Travel Association, the proposal is nigh unto blasphemy.
"It is an American tradition," Fennel says of the drive-through. "This is Americana."
It's also big bucks.
According to the National Restaurant Association, about a third of the $103 billion spent on fast food last year came from drive-up customers. At the thousands of McDonald's restaurants that have drive-throughs, about half of sales go through the window, company spokeswoman Julie Cleary says.
The pick-up window has become an indispensable part of the banking and dry cleaning industries. Even marriages and funerals are being done on the run.
"You have a cellular phone, the mobile fax - you can take your whole office with you and do everything out of your car," says Pat Caffery, chairman of the convention and visitors board in San Bernardino, Calif., home of the first McDonald's drive-in.
"This has become part of our culture," he says. "I don't think there's any going back."
Some don't want to go back - they just want to stand still.
Beset by rampant development and under federal pressure to improve air quality, cities are looking for ways to put on the brakes. And the drive-through is a pretty easy target.
Too easy, complains Bill Sieber. "I think this is an arbitrary attack on convenience," he says.
Sieber is president of E.F. Bavis & Associates, a suburban Cincinnati company that makes nothing but drive-through equipment. One of its products, the Vittleveyor, makes it possible for fast-food restaurants to serve more than one lane of drive-through traffic at a time.
Towns like Carrboro and Sierra Madre, he says, are bucking a consumer trend that fueled his company's 28 percent growth last year. Some retailers - CVS and Rite-Aid pharmacies, for instance - no longer build stores without drive-throughs, he says.
But in Carrboro, the issue was preserving aesthetic atmosphere as much as environmental.
A bedroom community for the neighboring college town of Chapel Hill, Carrboro is a place where the bicycle is at home. White lines along the main roads mark the two-wheeler's right of way, and signs everywhere remind drivers to "Share the Road."