Brandau: How I came to ‘eat mor chikin’

Chick-Fil-A Photo Credits: Paul Brennan / Shutterstock.com 

This past summer, I ate at a Chick-fil-A for the first time in about 10 years. My long absence from the brand was due in part to proximity, living nowhere near a Chick-fil-A while I attended college and then I started my career in New York City. But the past five years that I’ve lived and worked near Chicago, the brand has been rapidly expanding all around me. I stayed away because, long before the issue became a giant controversy in August 2012, I didn’t agree with the WinShape Foundation, which was started by Chick-fil-A’s late founder Truett Cathy and funded with donations from the brand. During my time away from Chick-fil-A, while I didn’t want to indirectly contribute to charities or organizations working against the spread of marriage equality for same-sex couples, I also was not comfortable with people on my side unfairly bashing Chick-fil-A as some kind of bigoted organization. As a family-owned company, it was free to do whatever it wanted with its profits, even something I completely disagreed with. I loved getting the brand’s chicken sandwiches from my local shopping mall growing up, but I could live without them as an adult, I reasoned. My wife and I ended up at a freestanding Chick-fil-A restaurant in suburban Vernon Hills, Ill., because we were out with our toddlers and were pressed for time, and we decided we’d like to feed our son and daughter Chick-fil-A’s grilled-chicken nuggets to stave off a Level 5 meltdown. We were going to make a matching donation to the Human Rights Campaign for the same amount as our bill for lunch. And what happened? We had one of the best experiences in a quick-service restaurant in years: the great chicken we’d missed, genuinely friendly cashiers and managers on the floor, and special attention paid to my kids. The restaurant was impeccably clean, the service was as fast as it was friendly, and the price was right. The franchisees who ran that location were great restaurateurs. Did they share the Cathy family’s view on marriage equality to which I’m completely opposed? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they were excellent operators in a restaurant brand that deserves its pristine reputation for food and service. The lesson there for me as it relates to franchising is that customers often see a franchised location and the franchisor as one entity, when those of us who know better understand that the single franchised unit is largely independent of the larger brand. Even on the national stage, labor leaders want the courts to treat franchisors and franchisees as essentially the same organization or “joint employers,” and that is a completely different controversy that might take years to be settled. A backlash against the bigger brand can hurt the single-unit franchisee trying to make her living in her local community — especially if Mike Huckabee or another public figure isn’t using the brand to rally people around some ideological crusade and organizing an “Appreciation Day.” But if franchisees run their locations with excellent customer service and consistency, they have a chance to win people over when presented with the chance. And of course, I never said Chick-fil-A was anything other than a first-class restaurant brand, so the franchisor has a significant role to play in that situation as well. While a lot of work has to be done to better educate consumers on the difference between the franchisee and the parent franchisor, owner-operators nonetheless have to be ready to convert skeptics back into fans. I decided to stop into a different Chick-fil-A today for lunch, perhaps out of respect for Truett Cathy, who received his due appreciation from many in the franchise industry. Maybe a few cents from that transaction will go toward a “traditional-marriage” organization I don’t like, and I’ll advocate for my side of that debate in other ways to offset it, but what mattered about my lunch today was that the franchisee and his team delivered the excellent experience I expected. I just might go back before another decade is up.