Looks Like Another Egg McMuffin Dunkin' Big Gulp Audio Book Cell Call Morning
By Kathy Lally
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page F01
Americans make 51.3 billion trips to and from work in their own vehicles every year, accompanied by fleets of helicopters scrutinizing the traffic, scores of meteorologists watching the weather and the cheerful sounds of drive-time radio, offering the latest news and entertainment. The daily ride has given rise to audio books, the travel mug and a 7-Eleven Inc. trademark, Dashboard Dining. The national motto has become grab and go, and legions of businesses work feverishly to fill a near-sacred space: the cup holder.
Love the commute or hate it, once we settle back into the seats of our cars, trucks and SUVs, we expect some catering. Each time we get in the car and head off to work, we're starting the engine that drives billions and billions of dollars of business in this country, and that's not even counting the gas in our tanks.
"If you're going to spend a couple of hours behind the wheel, you have to prepare for it," says Mahlon G. "Lon" Anderson, director of public affairs for AAA Mid-Atlantic Inc. "We're like the old forty-niners who loaded up the mule for the day when they went off mining. We have to load up our own pack animals."
When the modern driver hits the trail, he's traveling past a familiar landscape of convenience stores and drive-throughs.
Sometimes he hears voices, telling him to stop. These are coming from the ads on his car radio. Or he sees signs.
These are the billboards, repeating the message. You need to stop, and it will take only a minute. Before you know it, cash registers are adding up another purchase, and an industry is booming. Last year, the National Association of Convenience Stores, which is based in Alexandria, reported record revenue of $394.7 billion.
Because more Americans are on the road and are driving farther to work, there are more temptations to stop to fortify against the travails of the trip ahead. In 1969, for example, commuters made 27.8 billion trips to and from work, according to the National Household Travel Survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation. By 2001, those trips numbered 51.3 billion. The average length of time spent on the trip has been steadily increasing as well, going from an average of 17.6 minutes in 1983 to an average of 24.3 minutes today.
There are many reasons for the change in commuting patterns, but for some people the desire to live in a less-expensive house prompts them to strike a bargain. They'll drive longer distances and in return get a bigger house and a smaller mortgage. About 3.3 million Americans travel 50 miles or more to work one way, according to the Travel Survey. But, as Anderson points out, spending more time in the car is not necessarily the result of traveling farther.
Drivers in the Washington area, for instance, spent 67 hours stuck in traffic in 2002, two days longer than in 1982, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. Despite it all, commuters stick to their cars, refusing to get out from behind the wheel: Ninety-one percent prefer to drive their own vehicles rather than use public transportation. Perhaps the time has come for the Maryland commuter trains to join the fray and acquire trays and cup holders.
Some commuters simply resent that time on the road; others lean back and turn on a recording of "War and Peace." Then, flying along at 9,500 words an hour, they take another bite of their breakfast sandwich, their eyes on the road, one hand on the wheel.
The average American eats about 20 meals a year in the car, says Harry Balzer, vice president of the NPD Group Inc.
More and more often, that American is reaching for a breakfast sandwich, which is not only the No. 1 food ordered at restaurants but is also the country's fastest-growing breakfast food, he says.
Getting food from a drive-through has become so common (1 in 5 restaurant meals is bought that way) that Balzer says a new appliance has appeared, the fastest-growing supplier of prepared food today. It's the car window.
Drive-throughs began getting serious in the mid-1980s, which is when Dunkin' Donuts Inc. introduced its first one, according to Andrew Mastrangelo, a company spokesman.
Now it has 2,000, and 500 of those have two lanes -- one lane for coffee, one for coffee and baked goods.
Even though the nation's 138,000 convenience stores sell three-quarters of the gas in the country, says Jeff Lenard, spokesman for the convenience store association, a car is much more than its tank. It's the thirsty and caffeine-fueled driver the stores desire so intensely. "A lot of convenience stores think of coffee as the new black gold as opposed to gas," he says. "You only make a penny or two profit on gas, if you're lucky. You can make more off a 12-ounce cup of coffee than a 12-gallon fill-up."
Still, it's important to have both, and perhaps a breakfast sandwich as well. Steve Sheetz, chairman of Sheetz Inc., says his family started out with a combination restaurant and dairy store, making their own ice cream, in Altoona, Pa., in 1952, an era of modest commutes. Now the family has 310 stores in six states and instead of selling ham by the pound, they're selling it by the sandwich.
"When we started in business, people weren't in such a hurry," Sheetz says. "Now they spend so much time in the car, the car has become almost an office. They're looking for convenience."
While one researcher speculates that commuters are going out of their way to satisfy urges for gourmet coffee -- having an influence on traffic patterns labeled the Starbucks effect -- most drivers remain in the market for speed and efficiency. Sheetz says his customers are multi-taskers, filling their tanks up with gas and their cups with a beverage. Of course they want a big, clean restroom. And they want choice, he says. Over the years, the Sheetz coolers have grown steadily so that they now are filled up with 350 to 500 different kinds and flavors of drinks, Sheetz says.
And then there's the 7-Eleven, with a name that harks back to the day when keeping a store open from 7 in the morning until 11 at night was so astounding it warranted building a business around the very concept. The company went on to take credit for being the first convenience store to offer coffee-to-go, which it tested on Long Island in 1964, says Kevin Gardner, a spokesman for the chain. The latest milestone is in lids. The stores are beginning to offer a lid for coffee that can more easily open and close, preventing spills. The company sells more than 1 million cups of coffee a day, along with 30 million gallons of fountain soft drinks. The company boasts 27,900 stores that it says rang up $41 billion in worldwide sales in 2004.
Dunkin' Donuts, which has its greatest percentage of sales during the morning commute, introduced its first lid specifically designed for use in cars in 1987. Two major redesigns have followed, in 1992 and in 2003.
Always, it comes back to the car. When 7-Eleven introduced new sandwich wraps last month, Joanne DeLorenzo, vice president of fresh foods merchandising, said one of the biggest challenges was making them car-friendly. To prevent dripping, the wrap makers used a cardboard sleeve. "Of course, the package had to fit in a car cup holder," she said.
If you are going to run a good convenience store, operators say, you have to keep in mind that drivers are spending so many hours in their cars, they don't have much time left over. "We are such a commuter culture that people are trying to make their time in the car more productive," 7-Eleven's Gardner says.
Lenard, of the NACS, says he and his wife have two kids, a minivan, eight cup holders and a whole range of products to fill them. Campbell Soup Co. offers Campbell's Soup at Hand in a microwavable container that has a lid with an opening from which to drink.
It fits into a cup holder. McDonald's puts a salad into a cup, which fits in a holder. 7-Eleven does the same with fresh-cut fruit, Lenard says. Recently, his wife bought facial tissue for the car. It pops out of a cup, which sits you-know-where. "Manufacturers are taking note of the commuting trend," he says.
The car cup holder is such an American phenomenon that Henry Petroski, a professor of engineering and of history at Duke University, devoted a chapter to it in his book, "Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design."
He chuckles about the first ones, two small indentations revealed when the glove compartment was opened, or the plastic, holsterlike devices that slipped into the frame of the door. Slam the door, and there went your drink. The arrival of easy-open aluminum cans forced a change, he says. Drivers had to put the cans down somewhere when changing gears in those long-ago days when manual transmissions dominated. The cup holder moved to the console between the seats -- in American cars, though not in European models. Eventually, Americans shifted to automatic transmissions, perhaps making it easier to eat and drink, Petroski speculates.
While on a book tour, Petroski discovered even more about the cup holder. "People came up to me and said the final decision on what car they would buy came down to the cup holder," he says. "It hinged on which one worked best for them."
Many of the nation's cup holders are filled with products from the Solo Cup Co., which began making paper cone cups without lids in the 1940s and, in 1950, waxy cups for cold drinks served by drive-in restaurants. Old commuting hands will remember that early coffee lids, whatever the brand, came without perforations for a sipping hole. Drinking coffee in the car required fingers nimble enough to tear off a crescent-shaped piece from the edge of the lid, creating room to sip without tearing the whole thing apart.
From those modest beginnings, the industry has grown large.
Every year, 14.8 million plastic beverage cups and 12.3 million paper hot cups are sold in the food service industry, according to Technomic Inc., which reports that food service operators spend $3.5 billion a year on beverage containers.
Cups and other containers have changed dramatically over the past five or six years, says Beth Dahlke, senior vice president of marketing for Solo Cup Co. Now, packaging is driven by the time-starved driver's need for convenience. People want to grab and go. And the coffee lid -- make that the beverage lid -- has just gotten a whole lot different.
Solo has developed the Traveler Plus -- the lid that 7-Eleven is adopting -- which swivels open and can be closed again. "It's geared for people in motion," Dahlke says.
Today's beverages demand a whole range of cups and covers, flat lids with straw access for sodas, domed for hot beverages, bubble-topped to accommodate whipped cream or frozen drinks.
"Have you ever tried to eat a salad in the car?" Dahlke asks.
If so, you've understood the merits of salads that fit in a cup and can be shaken out. And you probably are fond of condiment containers that stay shut. "Our products have to be motion friendly," she says.
All that motion has been good for the audio book industry, says Mary Beth Roche, president of the Audio Publishers Association, who estimates the size of the market at $800 million and growing.
Tapes still make up about half the market, but CDs are rapidly gaining ground. And download is big. Audible, a provider of digitally delivered spoken-word audio, saw sales rise to $18 million in 2003, up from $5 million in 2001.
Already, the Internet is full of Web sites advertising adaptors for the iPod, which hook it up to the car radio and comfortably cradle it -- in the cup holder.
"We know the number one place people listen to an audio book is in the car," she says. "The best patrons are the best book-buyers. They're avid readers who use audio books to keep up when their eyes are busy."
A 300-page book can take 8 1/2 to 9 hours on tape, she says, and a 500-page book from 18 to 19 hours. Often she hears from listeners who say they couldn't turn a book off, even once they pulled up to the office or home. "They sit in the car, listening to the end of the chapter," Roche says.
All categories sell well, she says, but memoirs read by the author are particularly popular. Roche recently listened to "Comfort Me With Apples" by Ruth Reichl. "It was as if I had the most entertaining passenger in the car," she says.
One of the audio companies, Recorded Books LLC, was started in 1979 by a traveling salesman named Henry Trentman. He lived in Maryland, he loved books, and he traveled from South Carolina to New England. Tiring of listening to the radio, he posted a sign at Arena Stage, seeking an actor willing to read a book, which he would tape. Frank Muller responded, and recorded "The Sea Wolf" by Jack London, Trentman's first production.
"As commuting times increased," says John Alexander, director of marketing, "so did listeners." Today, the company remains in Prince Frederick, Md., owned by Haights Cross Communications Inc., and introduces 600 titles a year, Alexander says.
Trentman came up with his idea as commutes were increasing and technology -- in his time the eight-track was giving way to the cassette -- was expanding.
Alan Pisarski, who lives in Fairfax County and is writing his third "Commuting in America" book, observes that other technology has sped along at the side of commuters as well, particularly the cell phone.
When they were first marketed, he points out, many people bought prepaid plans and kept the cell phone in the car, in case of a breakdown or other emergency. "For $15 a month, you could buy a lot of security," he says. At first those phones sat, silent, awaiting an emergency. Then, commuters began to pick them up, calling home to say they were late, check on the kids, ask how the homework was going. It wasn't long before they got out of the car and into the hands of the kids, who grew up to talk while driving. The rest is cell phone history.
Pisarski finds the study of commuters endlessly fascinating -- he calls it the collision of demographics and geography.
Best of all, he does it all at home.
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