Life in the Express Lane

By Stephen Koepp.

They bear little resemblance to Mercury, the Roman god with the winged sandals, but they move with heroic speed. Clad in their red, white and blue polyester uniforms, the drivers for Domino's Pizza spring from their vehicles with cardboard cartons and sprint up the sidewalks of millions of U.S. homes. Customers often clock them to the second, since the 2,000-shop chain promises a discount if the pie takes longer than 30 minutes to arrive. To help drive home the point, Domino's sponsored a race car that finished fifth in the Indianapolis 500, with Al Unser Jr. behind the wheel.

Americans may value such business virtues as courtesy, reliability, economy and all that, but in the end, what really dazzles them is speed. How else to explain such an affinity for one-hour photo developing, instant replay, touch- tone phones and suntanning parlors? America's entrepreneurs have responded to that imperative with some of the world's fastest products and services, ranging from frozen food to instant bank loans. Like Domino's Pizza, many U.S. corporate empires were built for people in a hurry: McDonald's, Federal Express, Polaroid and Southland Corp., the operator of 7-Eleven stores. "America values speed," observes Felipe Castro, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The more you hustle, the more money you can make."

The culture of quickness has inspired smaller operators to accelerate their pace as well. In Los Angeles, for example, time-conscious consumers can flip through the telephone book to find Speedy Attorney Service, Fast Glass & Screens, Rapid Brake Service, Instant Wedding Chapel and Swift Secretarial Service. The dry-cleaning listings of any phone directory look like a thesaurus entry for the word fast, including the omnipresent 1-Hour Martinizing shops and archrivals with such names as Prompt Cleaners, Presto Cleaners and One-Hour Lusterizing.

America's love of instantaneousness probably stemmed from its rush to conquer great distances, at first with the pony express and clipper ships, later with microwaves and satellites. In the consumer marketplace, speediness became an ever stronger selling point. The first mass-marketed instant coffee, the G. Washington brand, appeared in 1909. The next year Florist's Transworld Delivery started sending flowers by wire. The spirit of hustle permeated pop culture, from the World War II-era song lyric, "Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry," to the Road Runner cartoon character who always leaves Wile E. Coyote in the dust.

Time-saving products and services exist all over the world, but America has a special talent for inventing ones for which the necessity had previously gone unrecognized. The birth of McDonald's in 1955 gave rise to a fast-food industry that serves 45.8 million people in the U.S. a day. The sluggishness of the Postal Service in the 1970s helped spawn a whole new industry: overnight delivery. Federal Express, started by former Marine Corps Pilot Frederick Smith in 1973, ships nearly 12 million packages a month.

On-the-ball businesses recognize that Americans often refuse to wait in line. Rental-car firms, though still notorious for their peak-hour queues, have tried with much fanfare over the past few years to whisk customers into their vehicles, and Avis provides car-return computer terminals so that their clients can avoid dealing with lethargic human clerks. Continental Airlines sells tickets by vending devices called Flying Machines, which dispense the boarding pass in just seven seconds. Many banks, the institutions most reviled by people in a rush, are finally getting things moving with automatic-teller machines. Even supermarkets are trying to improve their slowpoke service by setting aside express check-out areas. One grocery in Brooklyn, N.Y., offers three different types of fast lines, one each for those customers whose items number six or less, seven to twelve and 13 to 20. Just stepping out of the house takes time though, so millions of consumers have started doing chores on hotlines. Almost anything can be bought or any kind of information obtained at the end of a toll-free number. The Swift's food company provides the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line to give holiday chefs some last-minute advice on how to cook their birds. Connecticut Bank & Trust takes loan applications over the phone and gives a response in 15 minutes or less. One Queens, N.Y., company even sells beds by phone. Its name: Dial a Mattress.

Is all of this instant satisfaction a good thing for the country? Economists point out that efficient services like overnight delivery, when used within limits, can boost productivity. Sociologists believe that fast consumer services can benefit today's hardworking two-income families by providing more leisure time. But some doctors, notably Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman in their 1985 book Type A Behavior and Your Heart, contend that too much of a societal sense of urgency can lead to "hurry sickness" and unhealthful stress.

Nonetheless, American homes of the future may need acres of space to accommodate all the devices designed to speed up mundane chores. A truly modern home now contains, among other things, a microwave oven, a food processor, a spin dryer for lettuce, a shower radio for listening to the news rather than reading it, a personal computer and a giant hair dryer-like device for blowing leaves onto neighbors' lawns instead of raking them. Even consumer packaging is being built for speed. Toothpaste comes in a pump container. And Heinz, which once advertised itself as "the slow ketchup," now comes in a squeeze bottle.

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/ Los Angeles and Susan Schindehette/Washington, with other bureaus