That's why I typically bring 2 cars when I go to Texas.

I think it says a lot about Texas that you aren't the first person who told me they had the cops called on them for not having a car there.
My cousin went there as a foreign exchange student, and she lived a mile away from the town center. So she walked, cause it's less than 20 minutes.
Then a cop car stopped beside her. First they were friendly, asking if her car broke down. But when she said she doesn't have a car, and is walking, they actually took her in for questioning.

Crime: Being in public while poor.

Fred Flintstone the place up.

I dunno. I get plenty of drugs from Uber drivers and there's less paperwork and they deliver them right to me. . It's not a terrible alternative really.

North American in a nutshell

Why can't the European mind comprehend hell?

I don't understand why just walking up is apparently not fine

It is not. Welcome to the fossil fuel dystopia.

This is what happens when a society agrees that to be part of it you need a car.

I promise that the workers don't give a shit. They're not paid enough to care.

But they're being recorded 24/7 and if management sees them serving people who do not have cars in the drive thru, it'll be someone's ass.

Back in the day, cameras pretty much only existed for the cash register and entry/exit areas. Now, they need to put in laws to keep the companies from installing cameras in bathrooms... That shit is fucking everywhere.

The corpos at the top are mandating that anyone in the drive thru must meet a minimum requirement of a "vehicle" which cars and bikes are (at least in most places), but you, on foot, are not.

This is just them trying to avoid getting sued because you were standing in the drive thru waiting for food and some inattentive fuck pulls in after you've ordered and runs you down. It's really fucking stupid.

The idea that I think they were originally thinking is that people who are walking should go inside where they are reasonably safe from being run over to order/pick up/eat, then they started to keep the drive thru open later than the dining area, and here we are.

I get that they need to clean and whatnot, so they want to close the dining area, and that's fine, but close the dining area and leave the counter open so people can walk in and get take out FFS. It's basically just one strip of flooring that customers will walk into and out from while the seating area is closed, so not a big deal to run a mop over it and go home after closing time.

But nobody said corpos made sense.

This is entirely a corpo policy to limit liability. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that they want to prevent people from standing in the drive thru since that carries the risk of them being hit/injured/harmed while waiting in the line.

Its literally a problem because corpos don't want to get sued for an idiot driver gassing their way through a drive thru and mowing someone down.

Honestly, given how lawsuit happy many people are, I'm not terribly surprised. What does surprise me though, is that they don't have a walk-up window in a pedestrian safe area. I guess the logic is that the pedestrians can just go inside, but when the drive thru is open late, after the dining/walk in area closes, you end up with stupid situations like the OP.

I hate corpos.

I'd assume they want to discriminate against people who are too poor to have cars because they think those people are more likely to be difficult customers, and since most people have cars they don't lose much business by doing this.

Yes, but it's not illegal discrimination.
Pedestrians aren't a protected group, and neither are poor people.

Yeah, I can’t imagine this would stand up to an ADA claim in the US. Forcing a person who can’t drive due to a disability to pay an extra fee to pick up medication in a vehicle instead of just fucking handing it to them is stupid.

Because let's say you're the only person who showed up to work today. Trying to fill prescriptions puts your back to the rest of the store, maybe even takes you behind shelves. Makes it easy for you to get held up. Also shoplifting but I'm more concerned about your safety. With the drive through, you can give desperate sick people their prescriptions, and people who want other stuff can get it elsewhere.