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Business Experiment Underway at Chick-fil-A
Chick-fil-A is providing America with an interesting business experiment to observe how quickly a radical change in top management permeates the company to change the culture of the business at the front line.
Chick-fil-A is a fast-food chicken restaurant and enjoys enormous customer loyalty. In my opinion, a large portion of that customer loyalty arises from the outstanding customer service that is applied at the front lines. Employees regularly go out of their way to speed service along, to meet the needs of busy mothers with children, to accommodate customers with special needs, etc. Again, in my opinion, employees go above and beyond because of an attitude that was set from the top of the corporation by the founder, Truett Cathy, that his job as a Christian was to be the best person he could be by serving the customer to the best of his ability. Employees see their job as more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to be the best person they can be by providing to the customer the best service the employee can provide.
Truett Cathy’s son, Dan Cathy, is now CEO of the company. Dan Cathy is instituting a radically different attitude from that of his father. While Truett Cathy pushed company and franchise employees to look above and beyond the demands of the moment to a higher calling as people serving God, current CEO Dan Cathy is telling employees to respond primarily to the demands of the moment. The employee is an inferior being to other people, people who may or may not be customers of the business.
Last year many of us watched in horror as the company (presumably with his blessing), in response to political pressure, insulted the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes because those organizations implemented policies that, although incidental to their principal missions, were nonetheless consistent with traditional Christian teaching. This week Dan Cathy decided to pander to the anti-family Black Lives Matter organization by insulting a large portion of his customers, and by telling them that they should subjugate themselves to other people (which is different from being the best people they can be by serving others). He told white Americans they should shine the shoes of black Americans (regardless of whether they are in the business of shoe shining). White Americans should make themselves subservient to black Americans simply because of skin color. He said that all white American Christians bear responsibility for what other people did or do (a teaching decidedly at odds with traditional Christian teaching about individual responsibility for your own sins).
Now, most people on Ricochet recognize that pandering to the “woke” mob is a losing proposition. The mob will always escalate and/or change their demands. So now Dan Cathy is taking Chick-fil-A on a path that has no fixed guiding principles and provides no definable reason by which to distinguish itself from any other fast food chicken restaurant.
How long before the change at the top of the corporation from “become the best you can be by providing the best you can to others” to “submit to others because you are worthless scum” infects the entire company? How long before the front line workers decide that working for Chick-fil-A does not call for any special dedication, no special reason to go above and beyond on behalf of a customer? How long before Chick-fil-A loses its customer service advantage, and becomes just another chicken fast food restaurant, indistinguishable from any of the numerous other fast-food restaurants that fill our towns?
Published in Culture
Love that chicken from Popeye’s.
If only I didn’t have to wait 15 minutes in the drive-thru to get my order!
Memo to Popeye’s: If it’s more than 15 minutes before closing and you’re low on chicken strips, go ahead and make some more before you run out.
I’ma gonna Chikin out. I’ll be going to Whataburger or In-N-Out.
I’m done with them. But the bottom line is the bottom line. As a capitalist, I believe it’s the obligation of management to maximize revenue. It would be kind of Cool if they failed, but, if this bowing and scraping works, so be it.
I had a really down day yesterday due to reading the news about Chik-fil-A kowtowing to the woke-mob and then running across another article about BSA adding a “diversity badge” to its requirements for Eagle Scout.
This was on the heels of Thursday night’s taping of my church’s weekend service (I volunteer as a cameraman) during which one of the pastors included a sort-of shout-out to the country/pop group “Lady A”, nee Lady Antebellum, who recently changed their name due to discovering that their previous name was deemed problematic by the woke-mob. He encouraged people to read about their name change on the group’s web site. I tried to read it, but had to stop after a sentence or two in order to not purge my stomach contents into my laptop keyboard.
And this was on the heels of the previous week’s taping at which one of the lead singers was wearing a t-shirt instructing everyone to “Pray for an end to racism.” I practically bit off my tongue so as not to ask her if she also wanted everyone to pray for an end to racial demagoguery. She’s lily-white, BTW. Note that this is a fellowship-bible church, squarely in the middle of what used to be called “Evangelical” Christianity, not a left-wing Presbyterian or Methodist church.
The woke religion appears to be slowly crowding out the Gospel.
A good friend wrote in his bible, at the bottom of the last page of Revelations, “We win!” I sometimes have a hard time remembering that God can and will use all this to His ultimate glory. In the meanwhile, the Enemy is on a roll.
I used to support Chick because they boldly stood up for Christian values. I was willing to go out of the way and pay a little more. No reason to make any extra effort now. I like the chicken sandwiches at Arby’s, Jack’s and Carl’s just as well. And they’re usually cheaper.
He would better to have said, “I plan to do XYZ.” Rather than tell other people to do something. If he is leading, then people will follow.
His approach seems very different from his father who seemed not to have worn everything on his sleeve.
I love Chick-fil-A, but he should be ware. I bow to no one, not even Chick-fil-A.
I hereby coin a new term for people like Dan Cathy:
The sandwiches are good, but the sides suck and there’s no awesome ‘hate shake’. Even so, I’ve gone to Popeyes over Chik-Fil-A the past several times I craved a Chicken sandwich.
Inertia is powerful. Truett influenced most of the upper and middle management. It will take 5 years for the rot to take over.
Inertia is powerful. Many companies have been frustrated at how hard it is to change corporate culture when the CEO intentionally wants to change it. But we have seen a lot of big changes move faster today than they did a few years ago. That’s why I think it will be interesting to see how fast Dan Cathy’s radical changes flow through the company.
Another aspect of the interesting business experiment. Chick-fil-A’s traditional customer has been tremendously loyal, and a lot of Chick-fil-A’s revenue probably comes from customers who visit a lot. It seems to me that the “woke” customer is not a particularly loyal customer. So I would expect the company needs to find a lot more “woke” customers to make up for the loss of traditional customers. Can they do that?
Can they do it? No.
It’s like NASCAR banning the Confederate battle flag. Blacks weren’t big fans of NASCAR to begin with, and it’s doubtful they’ll start going to the races in droves.
But now they have a black driver! He supports removing the flag! Guess what? He will drive away more fans than he will bring in because of his poisonous attitude toward Southern symbols. Did Danica Patrick create a huge influx of women fans? No. If anything, she brought in more male fans, but I digress . . .
NASCAR fanship has been steadily declining over the years, so management is desperate to find new ones. By stripping the sports of its cultural roots, it puts itself in danger of becoming irrelevant.
Red beans and rice are alright. Usually I just get a sandwich.
I have never been to a Chick-Fil-A owing to Mrs Rodin’s antipathy towards fast food restaurants generally. This kind of “stunt” doesn’t make me want to go in the future.
And with regard to the avalanche of “wokeness” generally: If President Trump loses in November it will be evidence that our people have truly been transformed and are, in overwhelming numbers, accepting the intellectual shackles of the Left.
Cluckservatives.
That’s what Cathy’s gamble here is. The loss of their lease at their first store in London, the protests in Toronto, and the general negative attitude of deep Blue city mayors around the U.S. to Chick-fil-A’s arrival has convinced the CEO he needs to change the company’s image to get people in those places to like them, while at the same time hoping those efforts won’t negatively impact the company’s brand loyalty, which is based in part on the religious beliefs Dan Cathy’s father made an integral part of the company.
It’s likely going to be a failed strategy, based on the ongoing experience of Starbucks. Howard Schultz and now Kevin Johnson have done everything possible to try and appease the angry woke mobs, but it doesn’t matter when there’s an angry woke mob riot anywhere. They always trash the Starbucks, because they reflexively see Starbucks as a big, evil corporation, and have done so since the 1999 WTO riots in Seattle. And that’s for a company that other liberals like — the left in unison detests Chick-fil-A, and will only like them if they genuflect to the point of openly disdaining Christianity. And if they do that, their current loyal customer base is going away.
The taliwoke.
I expect this is correct. I’ve worked in QSR (quick service restaurants, the industry term for “fast food”) and surveys consistently indicate 80% of sales come from around 30 to 40% of customers. The typical loyal customer visits 5 times per week
You don’t want to alienate those customers. But, as noted in another comment, inertia plays a role.
I’m always amazed when a highly successful company decides to embark on a path that leads to that company’s demise.
Long ago, I learned a lesson from Harry Truman. He was criticized for walking in Boss Pendergasts’s funeral. He recounted a story from Roman history. A certain Senator was described as, “His downfall began when he took his friends for granted and tried to bribe his enemies.” I kept that thought through forty years of practice in a specialty that depends on referrals. It is always tempting to try to attract someone else who is not a friend but never do so at the expense of those who are friends or supporters. It does not turn out well.
There is an old Chinese proverb that applies.
First generation coolie,
Second generation Merchant,
Third generation rich man,
Fourth generation coolie.
The Murdoch boys are working on this and now the trust fund baby Cathy.
They never think they’re doing that initially. But it’s always the ongoing demands of the left, combined with bringing in people to the company sympathetic to those demands, that causes things to fall apart. Cathy may think shining a black man’s shoes on stage in 2020 is going to get Chick-fil-A into European markets and make expanding into deep Blue cities easier. But they’ll still hate it, until the virtue signaling is to the level of removing all of Truett Cathy’s religious messaging from the company. Then they’ll wonder where their customers went.
I’m not a regular customer of Chick-fil-A but I have respected their past commitment to principles of Christian faith. Whether some of these recent practices are momentary blips or harbingers of significant change in their corporate culture is unclear to me.
Yet, many people have noticed that when second and third generation family members take over the helm of companies and institutions, they often depart from the original mission, and most often that departure is in a more progressive direction.
I think that there are a lot of people who don’t like Trump and aren’t “accepting the intellectual shackles of the Left.” There is way too much binary/black-white/if-you-don’t-agree-with-me-you’re-evil thinking going on here.
A very helpful comment.
With Cathy’s most recent action, his comments on-stage in support of black lives mattering likely wouldn’t have sparked a new kerfuffle by themselves. It’s the blatant effort at virtue signaling by getting down on his knees to act out the shoe shining that can, because the angry people on the left will still hate it, but now smell blood, and will demand even more virtue signaling from the company, while many loyal customers will either see Dan Cathy taking them for granted or favoring people who hate them and their beliefs.
Well they won’t see another dime from this family.
Conquests’s Three Laws of Politics:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies .
“With Cathy’s most recent action, his comments on-stage in support of black lives mattering likely wouldn’t have sparked a new kerfuffle by themselves. It’s the blatant effort at virtue signaling by getting down on his knees to act out the shoe shining that can, because the angry people on the left will still hate it, but now smell blood, and will demand even more virtue signaling from the company, while many loyal customers will either see Dan Cathy taking them for granted or favoring people who hate them and their beliefs.”
The next demand will be for “free” shoes. As I learned from watching detective movies, blackmailers never back off — they always demand more.