Rumpelstiltskin, you've got a deal.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, why is Chick-fil-A so successful?
We haven't even talked about the chicken yet.
Should we talk about the chicken?
Oh my God, yes please.
Steven, I have a pretty urgent question for you.
Are you ready?
I am ready.
The question is this, why is Chick-fil-A such a big deal?
I mean, I also love chicken sandwiches, but Chick-fil-A is not just a restaurant.
I feel like it's an institution.
So I just wondered if you had any strong opinions on Chick-fil-A, what accounts for their success,
your relationship with Chick-fil-A.
So I'm very curious to know why you're asking this question today, although I am tickled
by it.
If I recall correctly, I first encountered Chick-fil-A when I went to college in the
South where Chick-fil-A's were much more prominent.
They started there.
It seems like it would be a Southern thing.
I have eaten maybe five to 10 Chick-fil-A sandwiches in my life.
I thought they were perfectly yummy, although I don't go out of my way for them.
But it is true that they are wildly successful on a business level.
They are the third largest U.S. restaurant chain by domestic sales.
What?
Chick-fil-A?
No.
Yeah.
Wait, what's number one and two, McDonald's and Burger King?
McDonald's is number one, Starbucks is number two.
But I will note, when we talk about the third largest U.S. restaurant chain by domestic
sales, I don't think those are dollars per restaurant.
If you look at average sales per restaurant, Chick-fil-A is number one in the fast food
industry, beating McDonald's, beating Chipotle.
Really?
And in case you didn't know, Chick-fil-A is doing this only being open six days a week.
They're closed on Sundays.
That I did know.
We all know that.
So I think what a lot of people know about Chick-fil-A is basically they make chicken
sandwiches.
The founders are what most people would consider conservative Christians who therefore have
the shop closed on Sundays.
But also there's been controversy about supporting causes that grow out of their conservative
Christianity that enraged some people, particularly having to do with being against gay marriage.
The firm also made charitable contributions to organizations that were considered to be
biased or exclusionary.
And that led to a whole series of protesting and boycotts, which I also happen to know
a little bit somehow because we did a Freakonomics Radio episode some years back on whether boycotts
actually work.
We looked at the Chick-fil-A boycott.
Short answer is no.
Most boycotts do not work for a combination of reasons.
Number one, many people that you may want to boycott aren't customers already.
So you can't turn off the spigot.
If people that you want to boycott are customers, but they really like something, it's going
to be really hard for them to stop.
And also boycotts tend to get a lot more attention in the media than they produce actual outcomes
in the real world.
In addition to that, what was that documentary about McDonald's?
Super Size Me.
Super Size Me.
I left that movie.
Makes you hungry.
I went to McDonald's.
I was like, let's get a Big Mac.
There's something about boycotts that draw attention to you weren't even thinking about
Chick-fil-A.
Now there's a boycott.
And then you think, oh, the one with the tasty chicken sandwiches and pickle, and then you
start buying more, not less.
And then additionally, a boycott usually has some kind of political component to it.
Well, what that may do is then spur the side that's politically not against it to actually
patronize the store more.
This would be called a buy-cott.
Oh, is that a thing?
A buy-cott?
I'm telling you, it is a thing.
So there are all kinds of reasons why a boycott may not work.
And I think that was the case with Chick-fil-A and most boycotts of its type.
Did people line up to show solidarity against the boycotters?
I think there were some well-known conservative politicians who pushed the cause.
Mike Huckabee was behind a buy-cott of Chick-fil-A.
So those are all the political and cultural components of the Chick-fil-A story that most
people know.
But if you're asking why they are so successful, I think there's an interesting set of answers
which we can go through.
Have you been to a Chick-fil-A, Angie?
It's a very weird name, right?
If you're going to start a restaurant chain, are you going to choose something which people
can't even reliably capitalize?
The fill is not capitalized, the chick in the AR, it's got hyphens.
The A is for grade A, by the way.
They wanted to have this kind of pun in their name, again, not to be recommended, I think,
widely.
Anyway, there's a Chick-fil-A at the Philadelphia Airport, and by the way, it always has the
longest line, but it's a very fast-moving line.
And what does seeing a long line make you do?
Well, according to Ayelet Fishbach and other social psychologists, the line makes you want
to line up because you think it's very good, and that's exactly what I do.
I mean, I get to Philadelphia Airport, and if I have an extra half hour, I go to Chick-fil-A.
Now when you go to Chick-fil-A, do you ever order, let's say, a burger from them?
They sell burgers?
They don't sell burgers.
They do not sell burgers!
Was that a trick question?
Just want to see if you were paying attention.
I know their menu.
They only sell the chicken sandwiches, and then they have these waffle fries, which I
think are not very good because they need to cook them longer.
And I think they sell a couple of sides, and I think their logo is like this cow.
Right.
The cow saying, eat more chicken.
Don't eat the beef.
So I think that's pretty much their whole menu.
They do have salads, by the way.
Oh, they do?
Oh, okay.
Nobody gets them, though.
I don't know if that's a factual statement.
I would think it's probably not.
Oh, God.
Nobody orders the salad.
Okay.
Are you going on the record saying that no one has ever ordered a salad from Chick-fil-A?
I'm going on the record that rounding down to the nearest nobody, nobody gets a salad.
I am willing to put a little bit of money on that.
Let's put a percentage on it.
Let's put a bet.
What percentage of customers order the salad out of all total orders?
So I'm going to set the anchor over, under, and I'm taking the over at three.
I don't even know what over, under means.
I know we're on a branch of our digression, but what is the over, under?
Over, under is how you make a bet, usually in sports, but it works very well in this
case.
And I'm saying the over, under, the demarcator is three.
So if 3% or more of Chick-fil-A customers get a salad in their order, I win the bet.
Oh.
Which I believe we said was for a billion dollars.
If it's exactly three, it's a tie.
If it's under three, you win a billion dollars from me.
Fair?
Rumpelstiltskin, you've got a deal.
Seriously.
Are you kidding?
You think three out of a hundred people?
No way.
Okay.
Here would be my question.
Why would Chick-fil-A bother to have, now I'm looking at their online menu, three salads
if fewer than 3% of the people are going to order them?
Virtue signaling?
Of the chain?
I don't know.
Wait a minute.
I got to call my yacht guy to see what I'm going to order because I got a billion coming
in.
There's no way.
Okay.
So what I'm getting at here, though, is they have a limited menu.
And what do we know about choice and the paradox thereof, Angela?
Too much choice, according to Barry Schwartz, is bad.
Would you accept the possibility that one reason that Chick-fil-A does so well is because
they offer a relatively small choice, most of them being chicken sandwiches?
There might be some benefit from the consumer side because you're like, oh, thank God, I'm
not overwhelmed with choices.
But it's probably more on the production side, right?
Because they have, you know, economies of scale and other efficiencies that are like,
just get good at one thing, which is make the chicken sandwich.
I will say this.
If you look at the business practices of this company, they're interesting.
Let's start with the results.
Their customer satisfaction levels are the highest in the fast food business.
How do they do this?
Apparently, they have really friendly people working there.
So here's my question for you.
How the heck do you successfully recruit friendly people?
You know, there's the well-known book, The No ****** Whole Rule.
There's this entire philosophy around if you hire people who are good and kind people,
then a lot of problems kind of work themselves out.
But how do you do that?
I think it could be selection, but it also could be training.
And most companies who care anything about the quality of customer service try to do both.
Who are you recruiting?
And then what do they do when you get there?
You know, I wish that Jason, my husband Jason, we're here right now because he has
a minor obsession with Chick-fil-A, not for the sandwiches, but for the service.
And he was telling me the other day that they have a very unusual training program.
And it must be at least as much of that as attracting people and selecting them.
Do you think, however, you could train someone like me even to be friendly and
kind at a place like this, or would I be weeded out in the selection process?
Or would you just not make it very long there because you would be so annoyed by all these
friendly people?
Right, but that's expensive.
You don't want to hire people who are a bad fit.
You want to get rid of them before you hire them, right?
True. Good business advice.
Well, Stephen, I was talking to Bob Cialdini, the social psychologist about norms,
and I said, Bob, what would you be if you had not become a social psychologist?
And he thought for a moment, and he said, I guess I'd be a waiter.
And the reason he said that is that he's so interested in making people happy.
So I think that's pretty damn close to being a Chick-fil-A server.
I will say Bob Cialdini, first of all, very friendly.
Ugh, Prince Charming.
But what's so interesting is if you've read his book, which I know you have and I know
I have, and I'm guessing many other people have, it's called Influence.
He's written few, but this was the big one.
Yeah. And it's a recent revision of it, right?
Exactly. And he tells a story about going undercover in these different industries
to do his research to learn how firms manipulate people, essentially.
Yeah. And he studied this one restaurant where he was hired, I think, as a busboy.
He tried to be hired as a waiter.
Maybe that's why he says he would be a waiter.
It's an unrequited dream.
He was not able to become a waiter, but he was made a busboy.
That put him in a position to observe all the other waiters.
And he said the most successful waiter was this guy who essentially was a master.
Well, manipulator would be one word or a chameleon, but he immediately would size up
the nature and the character and the desire of a given diner or set of diners and adjust
his behavior to suit them.
And some of it was quite manipulative.
Like if he noticed there was a young couple on a date, he would sort of guilt the guy
who he assumed was buying into buying more expensive food by assuming that the guy on
the date would not object to being suggested a particular dish that happened to cost more.
So I can see Bob being an excellent waiter, but perhaps slightly more manipulative than
you or I might like.
Well, in defense of Prince Charming, he's also a bastard, you're about to say.
No, I was going to say, when Bob revised Influence, this classic book that every CEO
has because it's the science of persuasion, the second book really actually explains more
how his whole life purpose is to illuminate the principles of human persuasion for good,
not for ill.
And he has the motive, for example, of equipping all of us, us like unwitting customers of
to everything that's happening to us so that we can not be manipulated.
So that's my defense of Prince Charming, of Bob Cialdini.
He told me the same thing once, but he even agreed that even though that was his motive
and intention, the firms have a lot more incentive and motivation to become really good at manipulating
than customers do at avoiding manipulation.
That said, he's also noted that he's tried very hard to not let his book be used in a
super Machiavellian way.
That's not fair because Machiavelli apparently wasn't as bad as we've all been saying he is.
Right. He mostly like hanging out in the countryside being like not able to come back to society.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss how choosing to patronize
specific companies shapes our sense of self.
Decidedly walking past the Chick-fil-A, even though you love chicken sandwiches,
would be a way of expressing your identity.
Before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about Chick-fil-A's success amidst
controversy, let's hear some of your thoughts on the subject.
We asked listeners to share their experiences boycotting specific products.
Here's what you said.
I certainly have embraced boycotting in recent years from small choices to big ones.
I don't choose to spend my money at either Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A,
and my family recently switched from AT&T to another carrier because we don't respect
the campaign spending choices AT&T makes politically.
I actually think boycotting has become one of our greatest democratic powers.
I know that newsletters such as popular information and a couple of Twitter accounts
like Sleeping Giants that I follow have allowed me to target my consumption
in more ethically directed and I really truly believe more measurably productive ways.
I'm really grateful that there are resources to keep me informed
on how to spend my money more mindfully and meaningfully.
A few years ago in the city where I live, there was a major chef and owner of a huge restaurant
group who was accused of sexual harassment and a number of other really evil things in his
restaurants. Immediately people started to call for boycotts and I wasn't sure what to do.
These were some of my favorite restaurants, including one right around the corner from
where I lived, where I went for happy hour all the time. Ultimately I decided to boycott
the restaurants and so did a lot of other people and since then all of the restaurants have closed.
I like to think I played a small role in standing up for victims of sexual harassment
and standing up for what I believe in.
That was, respectively, Sachi Ezra, Mary Malaguti-Langto, and Amanda Nover,
thanks to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts.
Now back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about the remarkable success of Chick-fil-A.
Should we talk about the chicken?
Oh my god, yes please. I love talking about food. We don't talk about food enough, Stephen.
I'm looking at a piece from Mashed 2019 called,
This is Why Chick-fil-A's Chicken is So Delicious. Would you like to know some reasons?
Yes, please.
Number one, Chick-fil-A wanted their chicken sandwich to taste like it was a real homemade
fresh grilled chicken that you'd make maybe in a backyard barbecue. It's really hard to do that
on a commercial grill, apparently, over and over and over thousands of times a day. So to make up
for that, they put $50 million into developing their own special grill, which apparently is
successful. Here's what else they do though. Each piece of chicken from Chick-fil-A is moved from
the freezer to the refrigerator, allowed to thaw for 24 hours before getting fried or grilled.
I have read this, and this is a pretty important life hack. When you defrost things, you could put
it in the microwave, you could put it on defrost, or my mom used to always like leave stuff out on
the counter, which is apparently not hygienic, but I've recently learned that it's better to
defrost things slowly. So you put it from the freezer to the refrigerator, and then over a
longer period of time, it comes to a warmer temperature.
So you are preaching to the Chick-fil-A choir.
I guess I didn't even think about the fact that it even started out as frozen,
but that makes sense.
You think they just have chickens in the back and they slice off a breast every time somebody puts
it in order?
Thank you for that image, Stephen. But anyway, better to be slowly defrosted than quickly.
So plainly, they pay a lot of attention to basic food quality.
They have standards.
But it's not like they're going way above and beyond what other food places do.
But here's another reason I think that Chick-fil-A may be doing so well.
Their business strategy is also, again, not unique, but pretty unusual.
I'm reading from, this is the Wall Street Journal, 2021.
This piece is called The Unconventional Franchise Model Behind Chick-fil-A's Success.
Unlike most chains where the franchisee covers most of the costs of opening the restaurant,
Chick-fil-A owns every one of its locations.
They are like the Singapore of franchises.
Like, we're going to tell you what to do.
We're going to build everything. No local control here.
Well, here's what it says on the Chick-fil-A website.
Franchising is not an opportunity for passive financial investment,
working from the sidelines or adding to a portfolio of ventures.
In other words, if you want to take our fine Chick-fil-A name and use it to enrich yourself
without devoting yourself to the Chick-fil-A philosophies of chicken making,
you're not our kind of person.
Does that mean you can't own more than one?
I don't know the answer to that.
I do know that franchisees are called operators and that each operator is handpicked
by Chick-fil-A after what they call a rigorous interview process.
Do you want to know how rigorous?
I do want to know.
What's the acceptance rate, would you say?
Oh, gosh.
I'm going to say that it's probably something like Harvard Admissions.
So single digits around 5 percent.
It's a very good parallel you made,
but the acceptance rate is well under 5 percent.
It's 1.6 percent.
Wow.
So what this is adding up to is centralized control.
This is the firm running itself, wanting to have locations everywhere,
not leaving it to chance that a given franchisee will be good or not.
Now, what's interesting is top-down centralized control is not always the answer
in business.
If you were setting out to become Ms. Chick-fil-A, let's say, I'm curious to know the degree to
which you would try to follow this model, as we've been discussing so far.
Would you want to be very, very tight on local operations or would you say,
you know what, if we want to grow this, we're going to have to have a certain level of openness
and trust that people will do it the way we want to do it without exercising that level of control?
I am a micromanager, Steven.
I think if I were going to start a restaurant chain, it would kill me to know that there'd
be like a thousand people with their opinion about how to do things.
So I would probably be the Chick-fil-A. Yeah, that would be my philosophy.
Would you say that this conversation about Chick-fil-A has made you more,
less or equally likely to eat a Chick-fil-A sandwich when you have the opportunity in the
next one month?
Well, Steven, now that you've told me the full context, because as you know, I almost never
know what's going on in current events.
I am going to have to revisit my plan to go to the Philadelphia airport and go to Chick-fil-A
because my identity is of a left-of-center liberal.
You're like, oh no, I'm not going to eat one of their sandwiches because I know that the founding
family has supported causes that go against my moral or social or political fabric.
Right, that's who I walk around thinking I am, and that's who I walk around liking to think that I
am. The psychologist who leaps to mind when I think of identity is always Daphna Oizerman.
She's studied how people express their identity, who I am, and importantly, how that differs.
From other people, because that's the core of identity, not just that I happen to think of
myself as somebody who is left-of-center, but also to recognize that there are people
who are probably even farther left of me and also many more people who are to the right of me.
She, of course, would say it's your outward affiliation, like you could proudly tell people
that you're a member of this political party or not. But what's interesting is she's also
shown that people make consumer choices, like the products you buy, the restaurants you tend
to go to, as ways of expressing their identities. And in this case, decidedly walking past the
Chick-fil-A, even though you love chicken sandwiches, would be a way of expressing your identity.
So, too, I guess a by-cock standing in line because you're not even hungry but you want to
show support for Chick-fil-A. And now I'm really torn because I don't have the identity of somebody
who would support that kind of policy. On the other hand, I'm not sure whether punishing each
and every one of these franchise operators is the right thing to do because they may or may not
agree with the very senior leadership. Well, on that last point, I would
guess that if a firm like Chick-fil-A is so careful at picking their operators,
they're going to pick operators who are in line with their philosophy
and political and religious outlook on the world.
Is that even legal, though?
Oh, gosh, I think it's one of those things that even if it were not quite legal,
there's a million different ways that people do that all the time.
And there's self-selection, right? Like, who's the sort of person who wants to open a restaurant
that has this very explicit tradition? But also, in the very large franchise group,
could we say that everybody is against LGBTQ rights? That also seems to me probably not true.
But I do think it's very interesting, this idea that consumer choices are reflecting
things that are deeper and ideological. My husband, Jason, always says this about people's cars.
Like, he has this habit of buying station wagons. And I pointed out to him that we no
longer have small children. We don't have tents.
But that's his identity.
He has this identity as the sort of person who drives a station wagon.
He's a dad.
I guess so. I guess it's like the dad car. So I do think it's interesting if we examine
our own choices and the things that we would never think of buying. Like,
I'm not going to buy a red baseball hat either.
So a lot of people have struggled with this very question. Within the context of Chick-fil-A,
there's a piece I'm looking at now from Delish called, So Is It Okay to Eat at Chick-fil-A Now?
The firm sort of, I wouldn't say they apologize. They kind of clarified some things.
And they did change some of their contributions. But basically, a lot of people have been asking
themselves this very question. What if I love a sandwich that's made by a company whose values
I don't consider admirable at all? So it strikes me as almost the perfect example
of the slippery slope argument.
Should we be listening to Michael Jackson? Right.
Should I be spending the billion dollars that you're going to give me from winning a bet on
Chick-fil-A? Or should I spend it only on things that might morally absolve me from having won
the billion dollars?
Yeah, I don't know what the answer to this question is. I really don't. I think maybe
while the jury's out, we should all go to Panda Express.
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here's a fact check of
today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Angela says that the Chick-fil-A logo is
a cow. This is incorrect. The logo is simply Chick-fil-A, written in a script-style font
called Chicken Hut, with the design meant to represent a chicken's comb over the first letter.
Angela was thinking of the company's famous advertising campaign created by the Richards
Group in 1995, where a group of cows act in their own self-interest by trying to get humans to
quote, eat more chicken instead of beef. Fans of the cows will be sad to learn that Chick-fil-A
broke with the Richards Group in 2016.
Later, Angela bets Steven that fewer than 3% of Chick-fil-A customers purchase a salad.
We contacted Chick-fil-A's data analytics team to get an answer, but unfortunately didn't hear
anything back in time for this episode. I did, however, call 10 restaurants in the New York City
area and received estimates ranging from 5% to 20% from managers on duty. So, I'd like to declare
Steven the tentative winner here. If we do receive an official number from the corporate office,
we'll share it on our Twitter account, at NSQ underscore show, at which point we'll make Angela
pay up, but she can keep her billion dollars for now. Also, Steven and Angela wonder if Chick-fil-A
operators can run more than one location. In most cases, the company does not permit this.
In addition, operators are not allowed to have any other businesses.
Finally, I have to note, not long after this recording, Angela texted Steven and me a photo
of her having lunch at the Chick-fil-A in the Philadelphia airport. It seems that she had a
craving similar to the one she had after seeing Super Size Me, and Panda Express just couldn't
replace her hankering for a chicken sandwich. That's it for the fact check.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions,
Steven and Angela discuss a new paper about gender differences in personal well-being.
That's next week on No Stupid Questions. For that episode, we want to know,
how does your gender affect your happiness? To share your thoughts, send a voice memo to
NSQ at Freakonomics.com with the subject line, happiness. Make sure to record some place quiet,
and please keep your thoughts to under a minute. Maybe we'll include them on the show.
No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio network, which also includes Freakonomics
Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and Freakonomics MD. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and
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Our theme song is And She Was By Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Werner
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If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at freakonomics.com.
To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit freakonomics.com slash NSQ. Thanks for listening.
Do you like Panda Express? What's not to like? Have you ever had their bourbon chicken?
It's got more sugar than like three Snickers. I know that's why it's so delicious.
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