Having sold out of its popular chicken sandwich, Popeye’s is encouraging customers to build their own when they visit the store.
The fast food chain is taking the unusual (and potentially risky) move of encouraging customers to bring their own buns to stores to create a sandwich with a three-piece tenders meal.
Beyond the obvious issue of having customers bring part of their own meal, the cut of chicken used in the tenders is not the same as the one used in the sandwich, nor do the toppings match the sandwich’s. So people hoping to see what the recent fuss was all about might not have the optimal experience.
Popeye’s had what it thought was a two month supply of chicken sandwich materials when it launched the product, but as social media chatter about the product exploded, it exhausted those resources in just two weeks. The company said it is working to bring the sandwich back as quickly as possible.
The chicken sandwich was a gamble that paid off for Popeye’s. It was the first time in its 50-year history that the company had offered a sandwich. Popeyes is hardly the only fast food company to try replicating Chick-fil-A’s growing popularity. In July, McDonald’s franchisees called on the company to launch a Southern fried chicken sandwich of its own, saying Chick-fil-A is the competitor the Golden Arches should be most concerned about.
But Popeye’s is the first to really give the Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A a real run for its money, in the world of public opinion if nowhere else. Neither company has reported sales for the period in which they had competing products on the market, so it’s unclear if Popeye’s is stealing customers from Chick-fil-A or simply bringing more new customers to its stores.
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