For much of 2024, it was almost as if Wingstop and Chili’s were in a race to see which chain could produce the most extreme same-store sales numbers.
From the first quarter of 2023 through the fourth quarter of last year, two full years, the chicken-wing chain averaged 19.3% same-store sales. At one point, it had produced 20%+ results in five of seven quarters.
That led to the production of a 41.7%, two-year stacked number in the first quarter of 2024 that bested the two-year result Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen produced in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Chili’s, meanwhile, started doing double-digit same-store sales in the second quarter of last year and then, somehow, managed to double that, producing two straight quarters of 31%-plus results. It could not quite match Wingstop’s two-year results, but a two-year stack of 36%, frankly, is nothing to be ashamed about.
But what’s more remarkable about this is just how rare these results are, or at least they used to be.
(Check out RB’s Same-Store Sales Tracker.)
We have records on public company same-store sales dating back to 2007. Before 2020, we could find only one such instance of even a 20% figure.
That was, unsurprisingly, Popeyes in the fourth quarter of 2019, when its Chicken Sandwich drove same-store sales 37.9%, a number that remains the gold standard for quarterly industry results. In the decade before then, there were several results in the teens and a few in the high teens, including Chipotle and Domino’s a few times apiece.
Since the start of 2023, we’ve had 10 reported results of 20% or more: Wingstop accomplished that five times; Chili’s and Cava twice apiece. Chili’s twice reported 30% results, which had only been done before by Popeyes. (We discounted the years from 2020 through the end of 2022, when ridiculous sales results were commonplace because of the pandemic.)
What’s going on? Social media.
Going back a decade, social media has fueled some extreme sales results, both for good and for ill. And the first real evidence of this can be traced back to 2015, when Chipotle was hit with a mysterious e.coli outbreak.
That outbreak was followed by news of various foodborne illness outbreaks around the country, generating a media firestorm that that led to a 29.7% same-store sales decline for the burrito chain in the first quarter of 2016. That was far worse than anything Jack in the Box reported in the early 1990s after its own such and far worse incident.
There was also Papa Johns in 2018, which saw same-store sales decline nearly 10% at one point amid a social media uproar over comments made by founder John Schnatter.
Yet the Popeyes Chicken Sandwich demonstrated what can happen when consumers flock to a restaurant chain. Customers waited 45 minutes at times to try the product and then they returned again the next day.
A strong marketing campaign has long carried the potential to drive sales for a time and furors over traditional media have long punished brands for bad or perceivably bad behavior.
Yet the industry has never quite seen results this extreme. Both McDonald’s and Starbucks are currently dealing with weak results driven at least in part by negative attention driven by social media. And customers have used social media to effectively force chains to bring back items like Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza and McDonald’s Snack Wrap.
Last year, Chili’s leveraged some of the negative attention aimed at McDonald’s over prices to highlight its 3-for-Me platform and then rode the wave of the “cheese pull” trend on TikTok to the strongest results we’ve ever seen from a casual-dining chain.
For chains, these extremes can challenge operators who may not be ready for the traffic or the sales. Several chains have run out of supplies of products that fly off the shelves shortly after they’re introduced. Companies then risk missing out on potential sales.
It also challenges companies to leverage these temporary bursts into long-term results. Wingstop is dealing with that now: Its same-store sales increased just 0.5% in the first quarter, which can happen when you’re coming off a 40%-plus two-year figure from the year before. Investors so far do not seem fazed: Its stock is up 22% this year.