
Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is an Economic Indicator - RickJWagner
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-21/popeyes-chicken-sandwich-is-an-economic-indicator
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filmgirlcw
Apologies for the off-topic comment — I’m not really sure if the Popeyes
sandwich is an indicator of anything, but it’s a damn good sandwich.

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.

~~~
cco
Your comment seems unbelievable to me, though maybe this has more to do with
my distaste for lines in general, but I can't believe that a fast food place
has developed a sandwich that would warrant a 30 minute drive let alone a 25
minute wait.

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.

~~~
tenpies
Keep in mind Popeyes is not really fast food. Unless you're ordering fried
chicken, everything is cooked to order. They are bound by physics as to how
fast they can cook a piece of chicken while keeping it delicious. Add assembly
time, and even when it's empty, the cashier will tell you "it'll be 10
minutes" on a sandwich order.

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.

~~~
pkaye
> Unless you're ordering fried chicken, everything is cooked to order.

So all the sides (fries, potatoes, biscuits, rice and beans, etc) are made to
order?

~~~
filmgirlcw
The fries are definitely prepared more frequently -- biscuits too -- but the
sides are not what I would call the best part of Popeyes because they can be
made in bulk and put under heating lamps for longer periods of time than say,
chicken.

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.

------
jessaustin
Perhaps motivated by the submarine here, I was moved last night to try the
drive-through at a local Popeye's. Here follows a transcript of my experience,
which as one might imagine I don't reckon I will soon repeat:

 _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!_

------
danso
Until I read this story I didn't realize the Chikfil-A sandwich cost 50 cents
less. But the two times I've tried Popeyes sandwich, it definitely felt like a
superior value in terms of quality and amount. I'd argue it's even better
tasting than Shake Shack's ~$7 chicken sandwich.

~~~
magashna
I've never understood the love for Chikfila. Maybe it's just been the ones
I've been to, but the chicken fingers and nuggets seemed average at best.

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.

~~~
tjr
The Chick-fil-a chicken tenders taste okay enough on their own, but they
really don't taste like the nuggets or the chicken on the sandwich. Like it's
a different coating, different seasoning. Not sure why.

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.

~~~
amflare
Its all the same coating, but the strips are dark meat and the filet/nuggets
are white meat. At least they were when I worked there.

~~~
jharger
Back when I worked there (mid-late 90's) the chick-n-strips were actually
marinated in the same stuff as the Chargrilled chicken sandwich. Both items
are no longer on the menu, and were vastly superior to their offerings today,
IMHO.

------
metalchianti
For what it's worth, there seems to be a lot of viral marketing around this
product. According to this reddit thread I'm not the only one who feels this
way.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/ctcl8j/i_don...](https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/ctcl8j/i_dont_know_if_its_just_me_but_i_swear_the_whole/)

------
lowdose
I was expecting a story similar to the Big Mac index from the economist. But
it is just a product launch review. A hyperbole Bloomberg original that leaves
a bad taste.

------
JoeAltmaier
Funny story: 'Super size' was a hoax. You got the same sandwich, larger fries
and a larger cup. But with free refills, the cup size is irrelevant. So you
got a few more fries. At the time (super size is gone) I bought both sizes and
counted. The 'super size' fries had 15 more fries. That's what you got for
your 80 cents or whatever.

~~~
socalnate1
This is just a classic price discrimination strategy; nearly all retailers do
it in some way. Starbucks drinks have a nearly identical marginal cost to
them; but have wildly different prices. Software companies disable certain
features (that already exist in the software) to sell a lower cost version of
the same thing without hurting the margins with those who can pay more.
Pharmaceutical companies will sell both a generic and name brand version of
the exact same thing.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.asp)

~~~
baddox
I've always been a little unsure of the usage of "price discrimination." The
basic economics glossary definition generally refers to price discrimination
between identical or nearly-identical products. Yet I hear it used for things
that have obvious significant functional differences, like the storage tiers
of the iPhone. Surely many people are buying iPhones with upgraded storage not
simply because they are willing to pay more, but because they really do value
the increased storage. So is that called price discrimination simply because
the marginal cost increase to Apple is probably very low (much lower than what
they charge for the storage increase)? Is price discrimination just a
continuum that is not very well-specified?

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).

~~~
derefr
Think about it the other way around: Apple could easily afford to put the
_largest_ amount of storage they offer in _all_ their phones. From their
perspective, it wouldn't be much of a cost difference in the BOM.

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.

~~~
baddox
Well, yeah, but there has to be a difference between price discrimination and
simply charging more than the marginal cost. Of course anyone who would buy a
product at above marginal cost would also buy it at the lower marginal cost
(ignoring Veblen goods for the moment).

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.

------
foobaw
I'm waiting for the hype to die down - it's been sold out whenever I stopped
by.

------
perl4ever
So nobody remembers at this point they used to have one before the great
recession?

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.

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tareqak
It would be interesting to see what other goods and services were introduced
at around the same time as all these different iconic menu items. Higher
priced versions of the existing goods and services with marginal but well-
marketed perks?

------
RickJWagner
I was bitterly disappointed that Popeye's dropped the Shrimp Po' Boy.

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!)

------
Vrondi
...but, Popeye's chicken doesn't even taste like chicken. It just tastes like
salt.

~~~
zrail
_delicious_ salt.

------
b_tterc_p
Are wages really rising for the target market of Popeyes?

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uhtred
Poor chickens.

~~~
Japhy_Ryder
I agree. It's a real shame people foam at the mouth for a fried corpse
sandwich - doing a dis-service to themselves (their health), the environment,
and animal ethics.

~~~
dang
Please don't post like this to HN. It won't convince anyone, and just leads to
flamewars that make this place even worse.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

