Why Chick-fil-A wins in a Crowded Industry

Everybody credits the greeting.

You pull up to the window, the brace-faced teenager hands you a bag, you say thanks, and hear "my pleasure," as you roll up your window. It's warm. It's memorable. It's almost always cited as one of the reasons Chick-fil-A stands out. And it helps…

But it's really just part of the packaging.

What would happen if you handed every McDonald's crew member in America a script Monday morning and made them say "my pleasure" for a year?

My guess is McDonald's would still be doing well under half the sales per store that a standalone Chick-fil-A does. Those stores averaged roughly $9.2M in 2025 per the company's own FDD, while McDonald's runs near $4M.

The greeting is a differentiator, sure. But there's 3 decisions underneath the shiny exterior about what to sell, what to charge, and when to be open that makes Chick-fil-A one of the nation's biggest chicken shacks.

Chick-fil-A sells chicken. Period.

No pivoting to fish sandwiches if the quarter looks soft. Poultry or death.

Now look at Raising Cane's, which took the same logic and went one step further.

Cane's sells chicken fingers, fries, toast, slaw, 1 sauce, and done. No chicken burgers, no wraps, no breakfast, and no seasonal pumpkin anything. They’re not worried about pleasing everybody all the time, because that’s a recipe for pleasing nobody. Cane’s only does a few, simple things, and they do them well.

After 29 years of simplicity, Cane's runs about $6.6 million per store, more than double competitors like Zaxby's and Bojangles, and second in per-unit sales only to Chick-fil-A.

Here's a little detail I love. Todd Graves pitched the chicken-fingers-only concept as a business plan at LSU and got the lowest grade in the class. The professors said the menu was too "narrow" to survive.

He's now a billionaire and one of my favorite Contrarian stories.

See, every item you add costs you something. Whether it's training time, inventory lines, decision fatigue at the counter, or having to tell someone the McFlurry machine is down again… More costs more.

Meanwhile, every item you remove buys back a little time or margin.

In fact, chapter 4 of Own or Be Owned is all about cutting your menu, and tells you exactly how to know what's worth keeping vs. what you need to kill.

Get dibs on the book HERE.

This is where most owners flinch.

Fast food spent the last 2 years in what the industry openly calls the value wars. Dollar menus and $5 boxes, priced to bleed.

Chick-fil-A sat it out though. They didn't create a value menu, and offer no permanent discount tiers. When category traffic softened, they answered with an 80th anniversary campaign built on collectible cups and retro packaging instead of a cheaper sandwich. Ultimately, people are getting more enjoyment from their 8-piece nuggets w/ Polynesian sauce than they’re paying. And that’s all that matters.

Now, to be totally fair, they do give food away. The Chick-fil-A One app runs birthday rewards and points redemptions, and they've dropped free sandwiches and biscuits through it plenty of times.

Here's the difference between a permanent discount and the occasional freebie: a free biscuit costs them a biscuit. A permanent $5 combo costs them the margin of every discounted combo they'll ever sell.

Give things away, and the customer feels lucky. Cut the price, and the customer learns your real number.

Once they learn it, that's the number. And every future quote gets measured against the day you slashed the cost to bring in more business.

Every Chick-fil-A in America is closed on Sunday.

That's 52 days a year, roughly 14% of the calendar, handed to the competition for free. But they still cleared nearly $24 billion in U.S. system sales last year working 6 days a week.

They started doing it in 1946 for religious reasons, and they've kept doing it for 80 years, because it works.

Closing Sundays does 2 things: It gives your team a life, which is why operators can hire people who stay. And it tells 200 million Americans that the product is special.

After all, how many times have you been driving around town and thought, "You know what sounds good? Some Chick-fil-A!" So you turn the car around and start cruising down the street, only to remember halfway there. It's Sunday!

That scarcity (real or manufactured) makes their chicken seem more desirable.

Notice how when a business's books are full, it makes people feel like they must be doing something right? Same thing.

If you're hard to get, you must be worth it!

Sell fewer things, refuse to discount your product or service, and limit when people can get them. By staying simple, providing value, and limiting your availability, you position yourself as premium in the eyes of your customer.

Call it the Subtraction Premium.

Most owners try to grow by addition, because addition feels logical. Add another service line, stay open on the weekends, more, more, more…

The Subtraction Premium hints that you might be able to make more, by doing less. You still have to work hard, obviously. But if you're focused on doing fewer things better, the customer gets a better result.

And you get better margins.

Chick-fil-A has 3,000 stores and Cane's has 900. So it’s easy to write both off as "well, sure, you can do anything if you’re big enough."

Take a look at PopUp Bagels.

A guy named Adam Goldberg started making bagels in his Connecticut kitchen during lockdown as a hobby. There's about 30 stores now, and shops run as small as 1,000 square feet with 10 to 15 employees at open, and the average ticket tops $24.

$24 at a bagel shop!

And all they do is bags of bagels with spreads. No sandwiches or specialty one-offs. You can’t even buy a single bagel, with the minimum order being 3. A little odd? Maybe. But it’s working.

If every PopUp customer is spending $24 per order, while a single bagel with a schmear only runs someone around $4 somewhere else, it’s pretty easy to see why PopUp is crushing.

Bloomberg reported in April that Tiger Global backed the company at a $300 million valuation, when just 5 months earlier that number was $60 million.

That's with 30 stores, only 5 years out from a kitchen hobby. Clearly, the Subtraction Premium doesn't require hundreds of locations and a head start to be effective.

Grab some paper, or open your notes app.

This'll take about 10 minutes and should be a little uncomfortable.

Column 1. What you sell.

Write every service, package, product, and one-off you've said yes to in the last 12 months. Every owner who does this finds more lines than they expected.

Column 2. What it's worth.

Next to each one, write the profit, then write how much of your personal time it eats. The gap between those 2 numbers is where your business is bleeding.

Column 3. What goes.

Sort by profit-to-headache ratio and cross out the bottom third.

Then answer 3 questions:

Most owners run this and can find 2 or 3 lines that produce tons of noise and almost no profit. Cutting them might cost you a little revenue initially, but it'll buy back time and focus.

Two things most people are woefully short on.

Your menu didn't get bloated because you're undisciplined.

Someone asked for a special order, and you said yes. After all, it's hard to say no to money. But you kept doing it, and 12 years later and your customers expect you to do everything, anytime, for any price.

Cut the bloat, and take what you can from Chick-fil-A, Cane's, and PopUp.

Every one of those looked like it was leaving money on the table, but by pricing appropriately and positioning their product to stand out, they win.

Anyone else hungry now?

Team Contrarian

P.S. One of the coolest parts of helping people buy and scale business, is hearing about how we’ve impacted their lives.

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