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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
After opting not to fund the Salvation Army this past Christmas, at the same time you saw the left try and fail to get Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys to deplatform the Salvation Army’s Toys for Tots effort that traditionally has kicked off at the Cowboys’ nationally-televised Thanksgiving game, Chick-fil-A had to do a ton of public relations clean-up on Aisle 7 work to negate the damage that threatened to do among their base of loyal followers (especially when it also came out the company’s charitable wing had donated to the SPLC). That was Strike 1.
The most recent incident was probably a foul tip Strike 2 in that it was simply a pandering virtue signaling move that’s not an official corporate action, but made people who might have forgotten about last November’s incident remember what happened seven months ago. That’s going to mean going forward people are going to watch more closely who Chick-fil-A is supporting with their donations, and will be looking to see if some of the groups Truett Cathy had backed in the past are now being given the cold shoulder by Dan Cathy, in favor of other non-profits more likely to be approved by politicians and media people in deep Blue areas. That could be Strike 3 for hardcore supporters.
That often? Wow!
Once you have paid the Dane-geld…
But even if there’s no formal or explicit boycott by people, it seems to me likely that developing a pandering to the mob attitude in the company is likely to impact front-line customer service in a negative way such that customers will just not find it as pleasant to patronize the business. The more emphasis the company puts on goals other than providing “best in class” customer service, the more likely it is that customer service will decline. Many companies can perform quite well with mediocre customer service. But it seems to me that “best in class” customer service is Chick-fil-A’s principal competitive advantage, so a decline in that customer service risks the business model. Boycott or not.
That would go towards treating your hyper-loyal base for granted and assuming they’ll always be there, when they could leave not simply because Chick-fil-A tones down their Christian messaging, but also because their focusing on things designed to woo progressives makes other aspects of going to Chick-fil-A less enjoyable (and it will be interesting to see how many of the franchisees, including those who share Truett Cathy’s religious beliefs, react if they see CFA’s attitude/customer service sliding towards McDonald’s or Burger King’s levels).
I too am curious how the franchisees will react. On the side of maybe things won’t go completely downhill, the typical Chick-fil-A franchisee has much more hands on control over what happens on the front lines at his restaurant than does the typical Burger King or McDonald’s franchisee. A Chick-fil-A franchisee is allowed to operate only one restaurant (a McDonald’s franchisee may operate dozens), and I think the Chick-fil-A franchisee is required to spend a considerable portion of the work week in his restaurant. No operation by remote directive. So dedicated franchisees may be able to keep some corporate nonsense somewhat at a distance.
No wonder this nation is in debt.
The franchise owners can keep to their positions, but they can’t do much to control what HQ in Atlanta is doing in terms of messaging, or what non-profits the Chick-fil-A Foundation is giving money to. That’s where you’d be likely to see a lot of anger, if the actions start eating away at the up-to-now hyper-loyal base so that the company can expand its reach into areas where politicians and/or activists try to block it or make CFA as unwelcome as possible (BTW, if you Google “riots” and “Chick-fil-A” it looks like no one went out of their way to attack their stores — one was trashed in Atlanta, but so were CNN and Starbucks).
I get one regular, one spicy.
The 3rd Generation problem is frequently observed in businesses. The first generation works hard and makes huge sacrifices, the 2nd probably grew up watching their parents, but they’re accustomed to prosperity and thus risk-averse. Dan is the 2nd generation, and so he is likely risk averse. That may well be what is driving him here, as much as anything else – he thinks the easiest safest way to expand the company is by pulling back from anything that could garner negative publicity where it’s going to matter at large (i.e. outside of evangelical Christian media).
The 3rd generation scions have no memory of the early years at all (they weren’t born), they chafe at the risk aversion of the 2nd generation, and want to spend the profits without having any idea where they come from. We’re a good 20 years away from seeing how Chick handles that.
I know a few 5th and 6th generation family business, though. There are some interesting stories in those companies, but what they all have in common is remembering that every generation is potentially the dreaded “3rd generation”, and so structuring the business so that it can only pass to competent and sane scions.
Deomonization also may skewer the timeline a bit.
Truett Cathy is sort of like Rupert Murdoch, in that both had a wildly successful business model that at the same time was despised by the elites (Murdoch’s sort of second gen, but took his dad’s small Australian newspaper business and made it an international company). But now you have the sons growing up knowing their company is hated by most of the people in charge of both the media and big city government, and they’re not going to stop being hated unless they make concessions.
With Murdoch, son Lachlan tolerates for now his dad’s marketing strategy because it’s profitable, but his brother James had to be forced out of the company, because he wanted to blow it up entirely. We’ll see how Dan Cathy handles his situation.
No, they can’t. It’s takes several times the effort to win a new customer as to maintain an existing one. Cathy is also likely to find that the “woke” don’t want to be his customers, they just want him gone.
As pro sports, the Star Wars franchise, retail outlets like Dick’s Sporting Goods and others have discovered in recent years, woke activists do a great job making themselves out to be a larger part of the consumer market than the really are. But after they get companies to change their product to meet their demands, they don’t spend money on the product, and simply move on to their next cancel crusade, and in many cases, sympathetic people within the top management spots in the company are willing to accept far lower profits (or even no profits) in exchange for an end to harassment and more favorable personal media publicity. If I were a stockholder in the companies, I don’t know if I’d be so sanguine over throwing money away in order to virtue signal.
This is the basis of my comment about Harry Truman.
Yes. There was once a competitor to Colonel Sanders that had better chicken. The company owner got very involved in the Lake Arrowhead area of California, buying and developing property. He spent a lot of money and got in over his head. The company stopped promoting the brand and the franchisees lost business. It was my favorite but I can even remember the name anymore. Pioneer Chicken, I think it was called.
The New York Times is one and is not inspiring. Fox News is in the second generation but trending third.
Lachlan Murdoch hates his prime-time programming, but gets that News Corp. makes scads of money off that programming, If he could figure out a way to change it without losing the profits, he likely would, but he doesn’t have a better business model.
James Murdoch either didn’t care if he trashed the business model , or was stupid/arrogant enough to think if he turned Fox News into a CNN/MSNBC clone and started having the New York Post sound like the Times and the Daily News that all the market share and ad revenues would stay the same, or increase. That’s why Rupert tried to pawn him off on Disney when they sold Fox’s entertainment properties to them (Bob Iger rejected the offer).
Good memory. That’s pretty much what this 1988 article says.
There may indeed be many people who are not liking Trump, and are not fond of the intellectual shackles of the Left either. But if we get Democrats in the White House, it is probably game over, America; hello American Marxist Party.
Never Marxist.
Is that a slogan people can get behind? I can.
I fear too many people do not know what that Marxist nomer actually means.
Wait until the buccaneers from Wall Street arrive with their slide decks and spreadsheets proving the company is worth a great deal more if they go public. Especially if they abandon that quaint custom of closing on Sunday.
I remember Pioneer Chicken. Blue logo. OJ Simpson was on their ads and commercials. 1980s.