The Sad Reason Wendy's Got Rid Of Its Iconic Sunrooms

Do you remember what it was like eating at a Wendy's when you were a kid, back when people still ate inside? You could sit any old place, of course, but everyone knew the best seats in the house were the ones in the sunroom. Square hamburgers and hot french fries (which some say are better than McDonald's) just hit different when you're bathed in sunlight peacefully observing two-way traffic. If you look at your local Wendy's now, you're likely to find naught but a big, square building; no sunroom to be seen. Why? Partly due to energy efficiency and partly because fast food no longer feels the need to be whimsical.

Let's tackle that first part. What do big glass windows have to do with energy efficiency? Well, the sun is famously quite hot, and when a whole lot of light shines through a big window it tends to get trapped inside (it's exactly how greenhouses work and why people use them). When you own a fast food restaurant that already has to ventilate a hot kitchen, that's going to make your energy bill skyrocket. And in the winter you'll have the opposite problem — now the sunroom is too cold as heat escapes through the glass so you'll have to pay more for heating. While modern sunrooms can mitigate this issue to some extent, Wendy's sunrooms apparently caused more problems than they were worth.

When people complain about the loss of the Wendy's sunroom, they're not usually just complaining about the sunroom. They're also lamenting the fall of McDonald's Play Places as well as the retro-looking Taco Bell interiors from the 1990s. In short, they miss when fast food restaurants were colorful, welcoming, and generally bore little resemblance to a storage facility. Why did the powers that be choose to make these temples of commerce so drab? Because it's cheaper, basically; and because fewer people actually enter them these days.

Think about it. When was the last time you sat down and ate a meal inside a McDonald's, a Taco Bell, or a Wendy's? We can't speak for everybody, of course, but we're guessing it's been a while. Drive-thru has reduced the need for robust indoor dining, which was reduced even further by the introduction of delivery apps. (DoorDash and Uber Eats take big cuts from your meal, but they sure are convenient.) Not only that, but the incentives to eat inside continue to diminish. Drive-thru customers generally get served faster than indoor diners and the introduction of self-service kiosks inside fast food restaurants makes the in-person experience even more impersonal. Why drive to a Wendy's to press buttons on a screen when you can press buttons on a screen and get the food delivered to your home? With all that in mind, it makes cold, logical sense that a no-frills building would be cheaper to maintain than a pretty sunroom — but it's still kind of a bummer.