Original story first published in Drive on 11 June, 1999
The changes the car brought to everyday life, whether for better or worse, are certainly for ever.
In cities and towns, 20th century urban planners have organised more and more around the needs of the motor car. Architecture increasingly is aimed at motorists speeding along the road rather than the person on foot or ambling along in a carriage. Houses have changed too, the gardens revamped to include a motor house (or "garage") and a driveway.
Roadside businesses, restaurants – and, of course, service stations – have developed into three-dimensional billboards, identifiable from hundreds of metres away.
It could even be argued that affordable four-wheelers broke down the old social order. You no longer needed your neighbours for friends, or to stick to your own neighbourhood for entertainment or leisure, or to shop locally.
The car combined perfectly with the refrigerator. People could buy a boot-load of food once a week, rather than grab it fresh every day. This became even easier when there was just one location in which to do it, rather than a succession of speciality shops.
The solution came with the Piggly Wiggly, the first of which was set up in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee.
The founder, Clarence Saunders, patented the idea, which involved the customer passing through a turnstile, following a pre-ordained route between shelves, selecting his or her own items and paying for them all at a "checking counter" at the end.
By 1930 there were more than 2600 Piggly Wigglys in the US, and plenty of imitators. Three years later Albers Super Markets (below) in Cincinnati coined the word which would become synonymous with the concept. The early 1930s also brought the first drive-in cinema, in Camden, New Jersey.
Restaurateurs adapted to the car with a new type of quick-service roadside restaurant. In 1948 the McDonald brothers, Maurice and Richard, revamped their diner, cut back the menu and added assembly-line techniques to food production.
By the ’50s the McDonalds name and concept was franchised across the nation. Pizza Hut, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell were among the thousands of companies following in the wake.
Soon you wouldn't even need to leave your car to be fed.
In Australia, the service station propagated "fast food". From 1957 Golden Fleece started building up a chain of restaurants that numbered 140 by the early ’70s. At about this time, American-style restaurant chains arrived here and achieved considerable success.
The number of restaurants at service stations may have diminished as a consequence of the McDonalds invasion, but there are very few stations just selling fuel. They are hosts to an even newer phenomenon: 24-hour supermarkets.
Nobody, however, has taken to the drive-in concept quite like the Americans. The Land of the Free boasts drive-in churches, wedding chapels and banks. On the other hand the once phenomenally successful drive-in cinemas have all but faded away – the convenience of video and rising land prices have combined to bring down the metaphorical curtain. Drive, June 1999
As it did in the US, the advent of the motor car changed the fabric of Australian society. With newfound mobility, came newfound freedoms and the ability to travel further than ever before.
That gave rise to the suburban sprawl, citizens no longer bound to living in locales close to their place of work. And like it did in the US, the car changed the way Australians shopped.
That manifested itself tangibly on 30 May, 1957 when Australia’s first drive-in shopping centre (and the first in the southern hemisphere) opened for business in the Brisbane suburb of Chermside.
Spread over 28 acres, the Allan & Stark Chermside Drive In featured 26 shops, spearheaded by the Allan & Stark department store and bolstered by a BCC Supermarket, which, in 1923, opened what was Australia’s first self-service grocery story.
But Chermside Drive In’s unique selling point was the 700 car parking spaces available to shoppers.
It was a ground-breaking concept for the era, with Allan & Stark even billing the centre as “an island of retailing in a lake of parking” in its advertising.
Some 15,000 shoppers flooded the Chermside Drive In on its opening day, lured by the promise of “the world at your feet and the realisation of a dream at your doorway”. Heady hyperbole.
Chermside became the successful template for all that followed, with all-in-one shopping centres – and their commensurate “lakes of parking” sprouting all over Australia.
Only a few years after opening its doors, Allan & Stark was acquired by retailing superpower Myer, while BCC had been taken over by supermarket giant, Woolworths. In 1996, Westfield added Chermside to its portfolio of shopping centres.
Today, Westfield Chermside, following decades of expansion, is the second-largest shopping centre in Australia, trailing only Melbourne’s Chadstone Shopping Centre.
As for those original 700 car spaces? They’ve been well and truly absorbed into the 7200 parking spots available on multiple levels at today’s ‘Chermy’. RM
Rob Margeit is an award-winning Australian motoring journalist and editor who has been writing about cars and motorsport for over 25 years. A former editor of Australian Auto Action, Rob’s work has also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Wheels, Motor Magazine, Street Machine and Top Gear Australia. Rob’s current rides include a 1996 Mercedes-Benz E-Class and a 2000 Honda HR-V Sport.
