Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is an Economic Indicator
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
My trash food friends and I drove nearly an hour (sans traffic it would’ve taken 20 minutes) to one of the only Popeyes in the Seattle area on Wednesday. There was a small line but a very long wait for food (understandably! It was similar to Shake Shack at lunch — lots of people waiting for their food), and we probably waited 20 or 25 minutes.
It was worth it. It was worth the 30 minute Uber I took home — putting the full trip time including eating in at 2.5 hours. I wouldn’t do this all the time — and I’m very angry I no longer live in Brooklyn and work in NYC where Popeyes was plentiful — but this was easily the best ratio of value to wait time for food I’ve experienced — and I’m a veteran line waiter for trash/novelty food (Cronut, Ramen Burger, Cookie Dough, other stupid shit I can’t remember).
It’s much easier to get to Chick-fil-A or Shake Shack, but I preferred the Popeyes sandwich. I was kind of hoping it was a trap/hype, like the KFC Cheetos sandwich (which was a disappointment). It was not.
I love the food in question, fried chicken sandwiches, and I was fairly disappointed with my first Chick-Fil-A sandwich, it was fairly lackluster. In my experience there are far better examples in non-chain restaurants that would warrant a bit of a wait.
Your comment may have convinced me to swing by a Popeyes, during a low usage time period, and give it a try.
Other things that a non-patron of Popeyes should know:
* There is a daily special (Wednesday is sandwiches in my region, it may be different in yours).
* There are coupons on the web site
* It is more expensive than fast food
* Being slightly mis-treated is part of the Popeyes experience. It's sort of how Chickfila is known for being incredibly nice to all patrons . . . well Popeyes is the opposite. If you don't leave feeling somewhat slighted, you didn't quite get the full experience.
So all the sides (fries, potatoes, biscuits, rice and beans, etc) are made to order?
I don't know how quickly the chicken turns over but it's pretty consistent -- especially if you're ordering something specific (X number of legs, Y thighs, Z breasts), because they need to ensure the proper quantity and that may require breading and then deep-frying the chicken on-demand.
The seafood is probably more "prepared to order" than anything, but I honestly don't know. I've never worked at a fast food restaurant, I'm just a giant and unabashed fan of trash food.
That said, the sandwich was legitimately good in a way I was not expecting. I brought one home for my husband and even coldish, he was extremely impressed.
So yes -- if you're near a Popeyes, once the hysteria has died down, I highly recommend it.
But a few weeks (months??) later the shop is as dead as a nail.
It appears all of the "hottest" places get 15 minutes of fame then dies.
I think this is enough of an indicator that your experience is atypical. perhaps you'd recommend some of these non-chain restaurants with great chicken sandwiches tho? i have yet to have any that are as good per $
I take it you're not familiar with the craze surrounding In-n-out. In high school, we used to drive 3 hours into the neighboring state to get Animal Style junk food.
1. This thing is delicious!!
2. Poor poor Chick-fil-A. Popeye's sandwich is much better. And I can eat it any day of the week.
When push comes to shove, a lot of people can be enraged online and still patron a fast food chain that offers very good food with very consistent service and quality -- even if we do it feeling guilty. And plenty more people just don't care.
This is obviously anecdotal and not based on any scientific information -- and it's also based on at least a little bit of stereotyping -- but the Popeyes I went to, which is in Renton, isn't the type of place -- nor is that location the type of location -- that attracts Twitter/extremely online people. Most of the people there looked like they were locals/lived in the area who wanted to try to latest sandwich everyone is talking about. This was suburbia.
I will say the whole "Chick-fil-A alternative" framing probably played a big role in the initial media push which has now trickled down into lots of other places, even if the political aspect is lost and it just becomes about the hype around the sandwich.
But given that you are in NYC, you have a lot of other options then. So may be worth a try.
I'm not sure if I've ever had Popeyes, but I was really craving fried chicken today. Maybe I'll stop at the spot on the way home.
Please wait to order.
Ok.
Go ahead.
Yeah I'll have that shrimp po'boy.
We ain't had that for four months.
But it's on the menu?
That's not us, that's corporate!
That's not you? OK, I'll have one of those new chicken sandwiches.
We won't have that until October. Then they get a new sign.
What? So the sign will have been wrong for six months? How does that... ok I'll get the two-piece meal.
We only got white meat mild and dark meat mild and... that's it.
Uhhh... no spicy? I'm gonna come back another time, when y'all get a few things worked out here. You have a good evening.
You can't expect much food left. It's only half-hour 'til we close!
Now Popeye's, I'll gladly go to every once in a while with the understanding that I'll likely need to take a nap after. Their biscuits are a meal in itself, probably containing 4-6 sticks of butter, but damned if it isn't delicious.
I like Popeye's just fine, but Church's Chicken! Now that's some tasty stuff. :-) I am five minutes from either Popeye's or Chick-fil-a, but the nearest Church's is hours away.
It's almost.. almost, like people have different taste and texture preferences.
To be fair, many people hate Chipotle because it's "not real Mexican food" but love Taco Bell, and probably just as many enjoy food from either place just because it's a certain kind of food. Not everybody is going for something that's a 100% perfect fit to what it's marketed as.
As mentioned, not everybody finds that food bland.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/ctcl8j/i_don...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...
A much more textbook example would be the rumored practice of airlines' websites charging higher prices to people using more expensive computers. (I don't know if those stories were true, but that would certainly be an example of selling identical products to people at different prices, based on their willingness to pay.) Another example would be digital goods like movies and video games being sold at vastly different prices in different countries (hence DRM and region-locking).
But, if they only had the one phone model, how would they decide what to charge for it?
If they charge a lower price, everyone buys the phone, but they're leaving money on the table because they know that some people would have paid more.
If they charge a higher price, some people don't buy the phone, and again, they leave money on the table, because their margin is large enough that they still could have made a reasonable profit off of these people selling them the same phone.
Price discrimination—a.k.a price discovery—is a way of taking one product, and selling it for two (or more) separate prices, by having people self-select into your lower or higher price "tiers" based on some feature that costs you essentially nothing—a feature which you probably could offer everybody, even for the base price—but which you intentionally remove from lower pricing tiers, so that only the people who value "a low price" more than that feature will select into that tier.
So, for Apple, price discrimination is them ordering NAND of smaller sizes—even though this isn't really saving them money, because it's bloating their manufacturing logistics matrix—just in order to make the experience of using their entry-level phone models worse, in such a way that they can specifically target price-sensitive customers with those worse phones. Then they can crank up the price for everyone else, because now they don't have to worry about scaring the price-sensitive away: they've already made a low-tier crippled offering to serve them.
The other comment makes a lot of sense, which is to look at the difference in marginal cost of two product variants compared to the difference in market cost.
Since this is impossible and consumers would revolt, the next best thing is to get consumers to self sort into buckets based on willingness to pay. This process is necessarily going to be imperfect and the tactics can vary but what unifies it is that the goal of designing your product offering is to elicit the revealed preference of the consumer with the goal of increasing profit.
Did Apple choose to offer different storage tiers to provide benefit to the customer or increase margins? Probably a little bit of both.
This is itself an indicator of your consumer profile. Many retailers that consider such consumers part of their target demographic handle it by listing the product at the higher price, but being liberal with discounts.
Those that aren't price conscious buy it at the listed price, and those that are price conscious shoppers will easily land upon a decent discount code. They even cycle through the promos in such a pattern that they hit most of the price conscious consumers with mediocre deals but still have reliably consistent fire-sale style discounts to draw in the super price sensitive.
It's such a tried and true strategy that even RetailMeNot, a site that's popular for price conscious shoppers, is actually owned by the advertising company Valassis (same company that sends out those weekly bundles of junk mail containing coupons and stuff, which most US readers should be familiar with receiving).
This would be typified by upgraded goods having higher margins than baseline goods.
The drink size is about how much you’re able to take away from the restaurant.
It’s true fries and drinks are higher margin items than sandwiches for fast food restaurants, though.
Takeout (including drive thru) is quite a bit of business, and makes cup size quite relevant.
In any case, they tell you exactly what you get for the price difference. It's not a hoax, even if you don't think the additional product is worth the additional cost.
Only if the customer is dining in; for take-out, it matters. On the other hand, soft drinks costs pennies per serving, so you are still mainly correct.
...
I'd like to know if it is as good, but there was a huge line yesterday when I happened to drive by a Popeyes in the same plaza as I was going to the grocery store.
But the spicy chicken sandwich is good. (IMHO, not quite Chik-Fil-A good, but it's very close. And different, which means I can alternate. Win!)