Chick-fil-A hit $23.9 billion in sales while closed every Sunday. Its CEO explains why that won’t change, even if it costs the chain billions
Source: Fortune ·
Andrew Cathy told NBC’s Today the 80-year-old policy is “just too important” to reconsider, even as the family-owned chain outsells nearly every rival while open just six days a week.
From the source
Chick-fil-A has been closed on Sundays for 80 years, and its CEO says he has never even run the numbers on changing that. “I never have,” Andrew Cathy told NBC’s Today co-anchor Craig Melvin in an Oct. 14 interview for the network’s “Business in America” series, when asked whether he’d ever calculated the sales the chain gives up by staying dark one day a week. “And that’s being truthfully honest with you, I never have because it’s never something that we’re entertaining. It’s just too important for us.” Cathy, the grandson of founder S. Truett Cathy, has led the privately held company since 2021, succeeding his father, Dan Cathy. He described the policy as a luxury of family ownership. “We’re not trying to scrape out every penny that we possibly can,” he said. Being “a private business and a family business,” he added, means “we can make those types of investments because we know it means so much to our team members.” A 1946 decision that stuck The policy dates to the chain’s…