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.
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.
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.
It's been my experience that they do prepare chicken ahead of time. I've always seen trays of cooked chicken sitting under heat lamps. Also, I'm not sure about your last point. I eat at Popeyes about once a month and have never felt that their service was any different from any other fast food establishment.
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.
I want to be clear that nothing about the situation was rational -- I understand that. Part of the journey was that it was indeed "a journey" -- and my friends who are also trash food aficionados/pseudo hype-beasts were more than willing/excited to do this stupid stunt with me.
That said, the sandwich was legitimately good in a way I was not expecting. I brought one home for my husband and even coldish, he was extremely impressed.
So yes -- if you're near a Popeyes, once the hysteria has died down, I highly recommend it.
I worked at a fast food place when I was young that served fried chicken. The fried chicken always took longer than everything else. One day I was left by myself for an afternoon shift without really knowing what to do. I'd never worked that shift and the person that was supposed to replace me never showed up. The chicken orders started showing up, I hadn't realized I was supposed to have started cooking chicken about a half hour before then. People were pissed. Most people ended up waiting at least 20 minutes. A few people just straight up left.
I'm in Australia so I can not get the food but it sounds a lot like what happens in Asia. I place will open and become "Instagram famous" (Or WeChat) and the lines will be crazy.
But a few weeks (months??) later the shop is as dead as a nail.
It appears all of the "hottest" places get 15 minutes of fame then dies.
> 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.
I think this is enough of an indicator that your experience is atypical. perhaps you'd recommend some of these non-chain restaurants with great chicken sandwiches tho? i have yet to have any that are as good per $
> 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 take it you're not familiar with the craze surrounding In-n-out. In high school, we used to drive 3 hours into the neighboring state to get Animal Style junk food.
I live around the corner from the Chick-fil-A just outside the Fulton St station. They have a snaking line inside _and_ a roped off line outside. A line to wait in line, and the outside line often is 40, 50, 60 people plus. I suspect some of those people waited as long as you did end to end, for a chain chicken sandwich in one of the culinary capitals of the world. To someone who hates lines, that's mind boggling!
On the bright side, the people who work for Chick-fil-A have at least one known, consistent day off each and every week. For most of you who have not worked a job outside of tech, that's a pretty big deal.
Oh, I agree. My sister works in the fast-food industry. She never knows what days she have off. Its horrible. Chick-fil-A is doing something right here.
I used to go kayaking on the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie (on I-90 east of Seattle) instead of the far superior Skykomish run on Highway 2 just because of the Popeye's at the Tanner exit of 90, right by the Snoqualmie run.
I mean, you aren't wrong, it's a dang good sandwich. I too waited 20 minutes in a line of 2 cars for it. I wonder though, how much of the hype is because of people who are frustrated with the Chick Fil A owner's beliefs, and not necessarily because it's a great meal? I would wager it has definitely contributed.
Yeah, I think the "moral" component is part of it, at least online. I'm not sure in practice how much of an impact that has had on the people showing up and waiting in line for the food.
When push comes to shove, a lot of people can be enraged online and still patron a fast food chain that offers very good food with very consistent service and quality -- even if we do it feeling guilty. And plenty more people just don't care.
This is obviously anecdotal and not based on any scientific information -- and it's also based on at least a little bit of stereotyping -- but the Popeyes I went to, which is in Renton, isn't the type of place -- nor is that location the type of location -- that attracts Twitter/extremely online people. Most of the people there looked like they were locals/lived in the area who wanted to try to latest sandwich everyone is talking about. This was suburbia.
I will say the whole "Chick-fil-A alternative" framing probably played a big role in the initial media push which has now trickled down into lots of other places, even if the political aspect is lost and it just becomes about the hype around the sandwich.
I have never had fast food that warranted waiting that long in line for. Rarely, there's good fast food, but nothing extraordinary. It's all kind of gross.
But given that you are in NYC, you have a lot of other options then. So may be worth a try.
As someone who never had Popeyes until recently I thought their food was generally trash as is most fast food. Disclaimer I love Mcdonalds but found this very low quality even compared to them.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's almost.. almost, like people have different taste and texture preferences.
To be fair, many people hate Chipotle because it's "not real Mexican food" but love Taco Bell, and probably just as many enjoy food from either place just because it's a certain kind of food. Not everybody is going for something that's a 100% perfect fit to what it's marketed as.
I definitely like it better than the Chicken Shack. I’m sure Shake Shack uses higher quality ingredients — like there’s no question in my mind — but the Popeyes wins on taste.
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.
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.
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.
Another trick I noticed was the shape of the box they used for the different sizes. The box for the "supersize" fries was tapered at the bottom so the fries wouldn't completely fill the larger box when they scooped the fries in, giving it the appearance of overflowing with fries. As you ate the fries, the remaining fries would slide down and fill the void so it seemed like it was completely full.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The economically most efficient pricing model is to install a brain scanner onto every single potential purchaser and then price the item at a penny below their maximum price or the marginal cost, whichever is greater.
Since this is impossible and consumers would revolt, the next best thing is to get consumers to self sort into buckets based on willingness to pay. This process is necessarily going to be imperfect and the tactics can vary but what unifies it is that the goal of designing your product offering is to elicit the revealed preference of the consumer with the goal of increasing profit.
Did Apple choose to offer different storage tiers to provide benefit to the customer or increase margins? Probably a little bit of both.
Dont worry, when we get remote brain scan technology, advertisers will attempt exactly what you are saying. This is a technology that may actually be possible, heck, it could be possible just by life monitoring at the scale FB and Google do these days.
I understand the fear of that, but isn’t it much simpler technologically to provide pricing information to consumers? If I’m offered a product for $100 and I check some website that shows the average price is $80, I doubt I would pay the $100.
> and I check some website that shows the average price is $80, I doubt I would pay the $100.
This is itself an indicator of your consumer profile. Many retailers that consider such consumers part of their target demographic handle it by listing the product at the higher price, but being liberal with discounts.
Those that aren't price conscious buy it at the listed price, and those that are price conscious shoppers will easily land upon a decent discount code. They even cycle through the promos in such a pattern that they hit most of the price conscious consumers with mediocre deals but still have reliably consistent fire-sale style discounts to draw in the super price sensitive.
It's such a tried and true strategy that even RetailMeNot, a site that's popular for price conscious shoppers, is actually owned by the advertising company Valassis (same company that sends out those weekly bundles of junk mail containing coupons and stuff, which most US readers should be familiar with receiving).
The greater the degree that the ratio of marginal cost to marginal revenue for the upgrade differs from the ratio of baseline cost to baseline revenue, the more you can call it price discrimination in a loose sense.
This would be typified by upgraded goods having higher margins than baseline goods.
The calories for McDonalds small/medium/large are 230/340/510. I don’t know how many individual fries each size has, but it seems like they do substantially jump in portion.
The drink size is about how much you’re able to take away from the restaurant.
It’s true fries and drinks are higher margin items than sandwiches for fast food restaurants, though.
> 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.
Takeout (including drive thru) is quite a bit of business, and makes cup size quite relevant.
In any case, they tell you exactly what you get for the price difference. It's not a hoax, even if you don't think the additional product is worth the additional cost.
> "But with free refills, the cup size is irrelevant."
Only if the customer is dining in; for take-out, it matters. On the other hand, soft drinks costs pennies per serving, so you are still mainly correct.
I wouldn't really call it a hoax. They were pretty clear about what you were getting for the extra money. Whether it's a good deal is a completely separate question.
I once asked a friend why he was buying an extra large drink. He told me because he wasn't a little asian dude like me that drinks tiny portions and that he needed an American sized drink.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So all the sides (fries, potatoes, biscuits, rice and beans, etc) are made to order?
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.
That said, the sandwich was legitimately good in a way I was not expecting. I brought one home for my husband and even coldish, he was extremely impressed.
So yes -- if you're near a Popeyes, once the hysteria has died down, I highly recommend it.
But a few weeks (months??) later the shop is as dead as a nail.
It appears all of the "hottest" places get 15 minutes of fame then dies.
I think this is enough of an indicator that your experience is atypical. perhaps you'd recommend some of these non-chain restaurants with great chicken sandwiches tho? i have yet to have any that are as good per $
I take it you're not familiar with the craze surrounding In-n-out. In high school, we used to drive 3 hours into the neighboring state to get Animal Style junk food.
1. This thing is delicious!!
2. Poor poor Chick-fil-A. Popeye's sandwich is much better. And I can eat it any day of the week.
When push comes to shove, a lot of people can be enraged online and still patron a fast food chain that offers very good food with very consistent service and quality -- even if we do it feeling guilty. And plenty more people just don't care.
This is obviously anecdotal and not based on any scientific information -- and it's also based on at least a little bit of stereotyping -- but the Popeyes I went to, which is in Renton, isn't the type of place -- nor is that location the type of location -- that attracts Twitter/extremely online people. Most of the people there looked like they were locals/lived in the area who wanted to try to latest sandwich everyone is talking about. This was suburbia.
I will say the whole "Chick-fil-A alternative" framing probably played a big role in the initial media push which has now trickled down into lots of other places, even if the political aspect is lost and it just becomes about the hype around the sandwich.
But given that you are in NYC, you have a lot of other options then. So may be worth a try.
I'm not sure if I've ever had Popeyes, but I was really craving fried chicken today. Maybe I'll stop at the spot on the way home.
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!
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.
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.
It's almost.. almost, like people have different taste and texture preferences.
To be fair, many people hate Chipotle because it's "not real Mexican food" but love Taco Bell, and probably just as many enjoy food from either place just because it's a certain kind of food. Not everybody is going for something that's a 100% perfect fit to what it's marketed as.
As mentioned, not everybody finds that food bland.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/ctcl8j/i_don...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...
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).
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.
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.
Since this is impossible and consumers would revolt, the next best thing is to get consumers to self sort into buckets based on willingness to pay. This process is necessarily going to be imperfect and the tactics can vary but what unifies it is that the goal of designing your product offering is to elicit the revealed preference of the consumer with the goal of increasing profit.
Did Apple choose to offer different storage tiers to provide benefit to the customer or increase margins? Probably a little bit of both.
This is itself an indicator of your consumer profile. Many retailers that consider such consumers part of their target demographic handle it by listing the product at the higher price, but being liberal with discounts.
Those that aren't price conscious buy it at the listed price, and those that are price conscious shoppers will easily land upon a decent discount code. They even cycle through the promos in such a pattern that they hit most of the price conscious consumers with mediocre deals but still have reliably consistent fire-sale style discounts to draw in the super price sensitive.
It's such a tried and true strategy that even RetailMeNot, a site that's popular for price conscious shoppers, is actually owned by the advertising company Valassis (same company that sends out those weekly bundles of junk mail containing coupons and stuff, which most US readers should be familiar with receiving).
This would be typified by upgraded goods having higher margins than baseline goods.
The drink size is about how much you’re able to take away from the restaurant.
It’s true fries and drinks are higher margin items than sandwiches for fast food restaurants, though.
Takeout (including drive thru) is quite a bit of business, and makes cup size quite relevant.
In any case, they tell you exactly what you get for the price difference. It's not a hoax, even if you don't think the additional product is worth the additional cost.
Only if the customer is dining in; for take-out, it matters. On the other hand, soft drinks costs pennies per serving, so you are still mainly correct.
...
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.
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!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html