Anteaterking posted...
I guess this raises a question for me: does fast food automatically == chain?
I think local restaurants that are as fast I still wouldn't refer to as fast food, but I'm not sure what other people think about this.
No. It is a style of restaurant and has nothing to do with it requiring the thing in question to be a chain. Like, McDonalds was always a fast food place even when it was just the singular place (and it the label was given to it on creation as it wasn't the first fast food place + the name was the marketing gimmick from the get-go). The same thing holds true with quality: being a fast food place has utterly nothing to do with it being crappy food. It's just that people have a really negative feeling towards the term because American chains are just generically so bad that it has lodged itself in peoples' collective minds (hence why "Fast Casual" is a thing: it's marketing trying to act like their restaurant is somehow better than the alternatives). In that vein having a drive through largely doesn't matter as most people, correctly, recognize pizza places as fast food (Pizza Hut et al) and those are commonly picked up/delivered to you + not all fast food locations have the ability to even have a drive through (it is trivial to just look up a McDonalds without a drive through).
Fast food is exclusively about its quickly produced status and everything else is just grasping at justifications for why *insert place here* isn't one more than it is actually is realistic/an accurate take on what makes a fast food restaurant a fast food restaurant.