On a conference in Galveston TA, someone told me they went to a drive through funeral... I saw drive through pharmacies and drive through ATMs. It's a special place.
Cameras also work better against cars - even if they have no license plates, you can get a make, model, and approximate year. A pedestrian might go any which way after robbing the store; a car has to stick to paved surfaces.
I had this issue where I had to get a covid test in Orlando and we walked there but they were expecting to come in a car. I ordered an Uber for that, just to sit in the car in a drive through. The whole experience was ridiculous.... The hotel we were staying at was just 5 minutes and we initially said let's just walk.
Sure, I'll give a pass for some degree of paranoia at the time -- lots of us were uselessly Clorox(TM)-wiping our groceries -- though, we were well past the peak when this happened -- but at this point we all know that worrying about surfaces is almost completely pointless. So all this "contactless" stuff is just a bunch of technology providers and payment networks trying to ride in opportunistically on peoples' fears.
Which, mercifully, have subsided along with most of the threat.
A person who is sitting in a car has to go through two windows and rise from a sitting position to attack someone inside. A pedestrian can be facing the window directly and grab with both hands.
If a driver pulls a gun, the employee can duck. A pedestrian can lean inside and shoot them anyway.
A person in a car necessarily excludes the possibility that there are accomplices hidden just outside of employee view. Pedestrians, not so much.
This just seems paranoid. Anywhere that does have a counter, anyone could theoretically put on a Hamburgler costume and jump over it with a big sack to raid the kitchen. But we don't worry about it, because it's vanishingly unlikely.
You can't run a society if you can't trust people at a basic level. You don't fortify every shop against Viking raids.
I mean, I've been in some Bad Neighborhoods where the shopkeepers all have plexiglass and bars and loudspeakers, but it's not remotely typical.
I'll also grant that there are a handful of places where basic norms have broken down, but I think that's mostly overblown by the Right.
You should be able to just interact with people like a normal human being. And mostly, you can. People have just gotten twitchy for dumb reasons.
That scene in the first Rambo, when he gets "picked up" by the police while just walking along a road, is fairly realistic. You're not supposed to be walking along roads, if you do there must be something wrong with you.
https://www.thekitchn.com/the-drive-thru-daiquiri-a-weird-ye...