![]() Boneless wings? They fell by the same percentage.įor all of 2017, Buffalo Wild Wings missed not only Wall Street’s expectations for same-store sales, but it’s own guidance, too. And despite rising prices on bone-in wings, Bloomberg reported that traditional-wing servings rose 6 percent. restaurants sold 1.1 billion servings of traditional bone-in chicken wings in the 12 months ended September, or 64 percent of the overall wing market. In January 2018, data from the NPD Group showed that U.S. Buffalo Wild Wings’ shares soared as it crushed analyst expectations the following quarter with earnings per share of $1.36, beating calls of 79 cents.īeyond the balance-sheet benefit, though, what was the real effect? Did this change actually suit Buffalo Wild Wings’ customers? On top of that, executives said at the time that boneless wings outsold traditional wings at company restaurants in 2016 (Buffalo Wild Wings sold 1.2 billion boneless wings and 1 billion traditional wings that year). A year earlier, Buffalo Wild Wings averaged $1.72. The chain was paying an average of $2.16 per pound. When Buffalo Wild Wings released its 2017 earnings forecast, it cited rising wing prices as a serious threat to its bottom line. The death of the deal could be credited to historically high wing prices. In fact, it was one of the company’s major guest count drivers for some time. The BOGO boneless promotion, which hit company locations by mid-September, wasn’t related to traffic. ![]() In late July 2017, Buffalo Wild Wings killed its famed Half-Price Wings Tuesday deal in favor of a boneless offering. But did Buffalo Wild Wings do enough to guard that positioning? In recent years, the answer isn’t so clear.Īll of these trends and changes aside, however, one challenge-an issue out of Buffalo Wild Wings’ control-really defined its final year as a public company. It grew and defied traffic trends because it wasn’t another casual brand. But stagnating on product offerings, menu innovation, digital pathways, store designs, and message as preference shifted and the market saturated, left Buffalo Wild Wings competing in a category it never intended to be a part of. Couple that with scale sports bars couldn’t compete with and Buffalo Wild Wings was a juggernaut with massive whitespace ahead. So essentially the issue was this: Buffalo Wild Wings once thrived on its concept differentiation alone. Counter-service chicken competition skyrocketed along with that preference shift, with brands like Wingstop and Chick-fil-A scaling up and investing heavy in technology.Ī reenergized Buffalo Wild Wings hits the comeback trailĪ look inside the Buffalo Wild Wings of the future She highlighted the rise of convenience among a surging, younger base, and how it challenged Buffalo Wild Wings more than many of its experience-driven counterparts. Smith herself acknowledged this in an old letter to shareholders. Cash-strapped younger consumers also started cooking more at home, and that included making wings. You also have to toss in how sports viewing, especially in public settings, dipped in the face of streaming services, affordable flat screens, and the migration from cable and satellite packages to more curated services. Millennials coming to spending age didn’t seek out chains at the same clip previous generations did. And they covered consumer gaps the chain failed to address. However, as Brown admitted, some of these upstarts brought more innovation to the table than Buffalo Wild Wings. ![]() Did they imitate Buffalo Wild Wings? Of course. But as the industry spiked in the wake of the Great Recession, when barriers to entry fell and real estate was more affordable, sports bar concepts also sprung up. One of the firestarters for Buffalo Wild Wings’ boom under former CEO Sally Smith, who joined in 1996 where there were fewer than 100 locations, was this notion that nobody had ever really built a nationalized local sports bar. He said this to Business Insider last February, shortly after the $2.9 billion blockbuster: “I think there’s an opportunity to figure out the 21st century incarnation of what made it so successful during, particularly, the early 2000s.” Buffalo Wild Wings’ turnaround efforts have chipped away at something chief executive Paul Brown alluded to before the ink dried on Arby’s deal to acquire the 1,200-unit chain.
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