Or pull a Chick-fil-a and send someone out with a tablet to take all orders and possibly payments. Takes one extra person (or no extra people if you have a McDonald’s style pay window and food window), and the line moves faster because nearly all orders are ready as soon as the driver reaches the window, or shortly after. No need to raise prices (and thus risk losing customers) if you can increase the throughput with minimal cost.
One of the biggest issues with drive thru lines is that often very few people have actually placed their order at a time, so the kitchen isn’t actually running at the pace needed to handle all the orders that are about to come in. Get the orders earlier and increase the pace in the kitchen, everything else can keep up because the kitchen is the bottleneck in a place like that.
Many coffee shops are limited to the rate they can build drinks. A backlog of orders wouldn't speed those up.
But I get the point. There may be some processes that are order-rate-limited. Witness the technology put in place at Fry's Electronics, with their signaling paddles like a ramp agent at an airport. How nice if your biggest problem is, taking the customers' money fast enough!
Around here that is the Dutch Bros or general coffee drive up process already. It also lets the people in the shop just make drinks instead of stopping to use the cash register or back (including any hand sanitation in between). Though Dutch is usually well staffed and rarely not busy.
One of the biggest issues with drive thru lines is that often very few people have actually placed their order at a time, so the kitchen isn’t actually running at the pace needed to handle all the orders that are about to come in. Get the orders earlier and increase the pace in the kitchen, everything else can keep up because the kitchen is the bottleneck in a place like that.