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From the drive-thru to the digital model: How decades of store redesigns changed the way people shop and eat. The drive-thru made fast food actually fast. 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. 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 store reopens on schedule instead of sitting wrapped in construction plastic for an extra month, or the restaurant 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.

Chipotle Korea prepares Android pickup ordering. 59 minutes ago Chipotle is expanding its mobile ordering channels in South Korea after opening its first Asian restaurant in Seoul's Gangnam area Wednesday. Chipotle Korea is preparing to launch its Korean app for Android smartphones after previously releasing an iPhone version, according to industry sources Saturday. The existing Chipotle Korea app allows customers to place pickup orders by selecting and paying for menu items before collecting their food at the restaurant. Users can customize the ingredients in each item, earn and redeem Happy Points, review previous orders and receive notifications when orders are ready for pickup. Expanding mobile pickup ordering to Android is expected to make the service accessible to more smartphone users. Demand for mobile pickup is also expected to grow because the Gangnam restaurant attracted strong interest from the outset, with customers waiting in line for nearly three hours even before its official opening. Chipotle opened its first South Korean and Asian restaurant near Gangnam Station in Seoul on Sept. 2. The 96-seat restaurant allows customers to select burritos, burrito bowls, tacos or salads and customize them with ingredients including meat, rice, beans and salsa. Chipotle plans to open two more restaurants in South Korea by the end of the year, bringing its total in the country to three. It also plans to open its first Singapore location in the first half of next year. (0)Comments. No comments yet. Be the first to comment.

Flossmoor's restaurant boom has two centers of gravity, and they look nothing alike. September 3, 2026 "This is a location that residents use every day, and we wanted development there to reflect what people actually want to see in Flossmoor." Mayor Michelle Nelson said that on February 2, 2026, the night the Village Board approved a Chipotle and a 7 Brew for a stretch of Vollmer Road next to Meijer. It's a reasonable thing for a mayor to say about a fast-casual burrito chain and a drive-through coffee stand. What's harder to reconcile is that the same board, at the same meeting, signed off on a completely different vision for a parcel less than a mile away: a walkable restaurant district modeled on the kind of independent, sit-down dining that already exists a few blocks from the train station. Flossmoor isn't choosing between quick-serve convenience and downtown character. It's building both, in the same year, and the two projects don't share a single design cue. What already works on Sterling Avenue. Downtown Flossmoor's dining core sits within easy walking distance of the Metra platform, and none of it is new in the sense of showing up this year. Flossmoor Station Restaurant and Brewery occupies the actual former train depot, brews its own beer on site, and has kept the same location long enough that a sandwich called the Burrito That Ate Flossmoor is just something regulars order without asking what's in it. Just across the street from the Flossmoor Train Station, The Bistro on Sterling runs under chef and owner Yvette Zavala, a small family-run spot where shrimp and grits and chicken française have stayed on the menu through whatever else rotates. A few doors down, Flossmoor Social brings an evening-focused restaurant and lounge to Sterling Avenue, the kind of dinner-and-drinks spot that used to mean a drive north toward Homewood. Taken together, these three define what eating out in Flossmoor has already meant for years: small, local, walkable, and run by people whose names are attached to the door. What's coming to Vollmer Road, and why it's a different animal. The Chipotle and 7 Brew approved for 3900 Vollmer Road are aiming for a fall 2026 opening, which puts the actual grand openings somewhere in the weeks just ahead. The Chipotle will have indoor seating and a patio, with a mobile order pickup lane rather than a full drive-through. The 7 Brew gets a double drive-through of its own. Both sit on an outlot next to the Meijer Superstore that's anchored that stretch of Vollmer Road since 2016, on infrastructure the village funded through TIF dollars specifically to prime the corridor for this kind of development. A village official quoted in that same HF Chronicle coverage, identified as Daggett, explained the logic plainly: bringing people to Vollmer Road for one stop makes them more likely to visit other businesses nearby. That's not walkability or a chef's reputation doing the work. It's traffic capture, aimed at drivers already headed to Meijer who'd otherwise keep going toward Matteson or Homewood for the same errand. The split is easy to name once you see it side by side: * Sterling Avenue downtown: locally owned, sit-down, walk-in, built over years around the train station. * Vollmer Road near Meijer: national chains, mobile order or drive-through, built around traffic that's already passing by. A third stretch that doesn't fit either pattern. If the story stopped there, it would be tidy. It doesn't. In March 2025, the Village Board approved a Class 8 development agreement with Ayom Siengo and chef Won Kim of On the Fly Hospitality to convert the old Sunnycrest Nursery property at 19725 Governors Highway into a roughly 2,000 square foot restaurant serving wood-smoked barbecue, with both indoor and outdoor seating. That's neither downtown nor Vollmer Road. It's a chef-driven concept landing on a stretch of Governors Highway that spent decades as a nursery, not a restaurant row. A few parcels over, Nehsog Properties, the company owned by Hakeem and Sade Bello, who also run House of Goshen and Oasis Hospice in Flossmoor, received village approval in April 2026 to build the Goshen Banquet and Event Center, a venue in the 15,000 to 20,000 square foot range planned for land between Governors Highway and Kedzie Avenue. It isn't a walk-in restaurant, but it's another food and beverage business staking a claim on a part of town that's neither the historic core nor the Meijer corridor. Add the townhouse and café project on Flossmoor Road, approved at the June 15, 2026 board meeting after revisions dating back to a December 2024 agreement with BG Park Centre LLC, and there's now dining or hospitality investment landing on at least four different stretches of the village in the span of about eighteen months. The full rundown lives on the village's own development tracker, and it reads less like a single growth plan than three or four separate bets happening at once. The thirty acres that could make the whole split moot. Here's the detail that changes how you read everything above. At that same February 2 meeting where the board approved Chipotle and 7 Brew, it also approved a memorandum of understanding with the Southland Development Authority to spend a year marketing roughly 30 acres of village-owned land east of Meijer, on Vollmer Road south of 198th Street. SDA representative Brian Mott and architect Edward Peck described their vision for that land as a walkable, urban-streetscape development featuring a mix of regional Chicago restaurants and independent shops, not another round of drive-through pads. If that land fills the way SDA is picturing it, Vollmer Road stops being a purely quick-serve strip and starts competing with Sterling Avenue on its own terms. Right now that's a one-year marketing mandate and a search for tenants, not a signed lease. But it's the single fact that tells you the village isn't actually picking a side between drive-through convenience and downtown character. It's holding both open at once and waiting to see which one fills in first. What this looks like on your way to dinner. | Spot | Location | Status | | Flossmoor Station Restaurant and Brewery | Sterling Avenue, inside the former train depot | Open | | The Bistro on Sterling | Downtown, across from the Flossmoor Metra platform | Open | | Flossmoor Social | 1040 Sterling Avenue | Open | | Chipotle and 7 Brew | 3900 Vollmer Road, next to Meijer | Targeted for fall 2026 | | On the Fly Hospitality wood-smoked barbecue | 19725 Governors Highway, former Sunnycrest Nursery site | In development, no announced opening date | | Goshen Banquet and Event Center | Between Governors Highway and Kedzie Avenue | Approved April 2026, in development | For a sit-down dinner tonight, Sterling Avenue is where it already works, and has for a while. For something quick between errands on Vollmer Road, that option is still weeks out. By the time both fully open, Flossmoor will have added real dining capacity in two directions that weren't talking to each other a year ago, plus a barbecue concept and a banquet hall that don't belong to either camp. Whether that eventually reads as one connected food scene or two separate ones depends largely on what happens to those 30 acres east of Meijer, and that's worth watching no matter which side of the village you live closer to. Growth like this tends to show up in property values before it shows up in a headline. If you're curious what the changes along Sterling Avenue or Vollmer Road might mean for a specific block or a specific address, Taylor Dixon Group can walk you through it, starting with a free home valuation.