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Chick-fil-A plans UK restaurants opening after previously facing backlash from LGBTQ+ rights activists
https://www.businessinsider.com/chick-fil-a-plans-uk-return-after-past-anti-lgbtq-controversy-2023-9
If he's making money off of them, money you spend on their food is money spent on hate. And it's a real shame because I actually really like a lot about how they run their business. It's good that they don't directly support anti-LGBT+ groups anymore, especially because it likely reduced the overall amount of money they were getting, it still feels really performative when the owner is going around their backs and doing it anyways.
But these days I wouldn't be buying their stuff anyways simply because the food they sell isn't terribly healthy.
I refuse to purchase from Chick-Fil-A because of how hateful they are. Just because the company doesn't directly donate to hate groups anymore doesn't mean that they're not still doing it through other means like the CEO personally donating, or through shell donations.
I'm not about that. Most chain restaurants have not great political practices, but none are as openly hateful as Chick-Fil-A.
I hope they get hounded out of here again, for good this time.
As an aside, I'm fairly sure that most British English accents don't use the French-style pronunciation of fillet as "fil-a" but instead use "fill-et". So their name doesn't even make sense. I can see people calling it "Chick-feel-ah" especially after the leisurewear brand "Fila" which is (was?) popular here. Or "chick fill-ah".
It's no Spud U Like, that's for sure.
Your comment about spuds has me wondering about the etymology of the word (seems like it derives from a tool used for digging in the ground like espada, spade, etc) and I ended up finding myself deep down the Wikipedia rabbit hole about the cultivation and development of potatoes and their role in different central and south american cultures!
Thanks for the unintended grist for the curiosity mill!
This isn't particularly relevant but it amused me, for context I'm British.
I read "fil-a" as fil-ahh, I then read "fill-et" using the French pronunciation for "et" and managed to take the exact opposite of your meaning from both words.
From the article, written by Nancy Luna:
What do y'all think? If American, do you eat at Chick-Fil-a despite the social backlash? Do you think they've offered enough recompense for their anti-LGBT+ actions?
Seems that although the company itself is no longer donating to many of the same organizations they had supported, they are still directly linked to further anti-LBGT+ support via the owner. Do you consider the owner of the company to be a separate entity or essentially one in the same, as this article describes? Do you think it even matters to boycott? Let your voice be heard!
edit: Posting this in ~food because it's a news article concerning a fast food company, but was on the fence about posting it in ~news or ~lgbt.
Maybe it's a doomer take, but the owners and shareholders of most companies are shitty people, and every major corporation is built on exploitation somewhere in the value chain. I still need to buy stuff. I avoid the worst of them, among which I no longer count Chick-fil-A, and try to reward companies for good changes, for which I'd say discontinuing donations counts.
Chick-fil-A treats their employees well and everyone who works there seems to be happy. That's a much better sign of an ethical restaurant than something like McDonalds where everyone there is miserable and hates life. I guarantee McDonalds is doing worse things with their money than Chick-fil-A ever has, especially since they're partners with Coca-Cola, who literally killed people in Latin America for striking.
I disagree with your reasoning. Although I do agree that money you spend just about everywhere is going to go to shitty people who do shitty things, not all of them are doing it in ways that have massive societal repercussions.
Beyond that, I often see this reasoning as an excuse to keep buying the same things, when they're choosing from a false dichotomy. It's not buy the chicken sandwich from them or from somewhere else; you have the option of not buying it at all. Make the chicken sandwich yourself and you've just cut out an entire corporation's worth of middlemen. You can make something without meat and get rid of another collection of evil people.
There are some things where that kind of mindset is more realistic. You probably can't buy an apple from a source you can guarantee doesn't use exploititive labor practices. You need a car to function in society, so you have no choice but to buy from evil oil companies. But you can avoid eating a chicken sandwich or buying a game from EA or Activision.
You said you disagree with my reasoning, but your comment restated a lot of the same points I'm making. I appreciate the expansion on them, though, but I disagree that Chick-fil-A's behavior a decade ago is causing "massive societal repercussions".
I agree with most of this comment. I need to buy stuff and corporations are by and large operated by terrible people, so for my own mental health and cognitive dissonance avoidance, I try and do alright by what I purchase. I understand that by my direct actions of purchasing certain items, I am supporting all sorts of nasty shit, so I try to avoid what I can. Just in case heaven exists, as I like to say.
But enough about me, what about you! As far as no longer donating, how do you parse the owner still choosing to support opposition to the Equal Rights Act? It's not as if he was just granted this money, I imagine a lot of it came through virtue of owning the business. I personally do agree with the article I linked, that it's difficult (if not objectively impossible) to separate the owner from a company like this, in that if you support one, you support the other, so I'm curious as to what others have to say and expand upon.
Please mind that I'm not calling you out personally or attacking you, just curious as what you or others may believe when talking about the concept of owner v. businesses they own. It's such a nuanced thing to discuss, because ya know, late stage capitalism, so I can't help but find everything about this interesting; hence all my questions in the OP. I wanna pick them brains man!
It's hard to draw a line here, as you mention. Would you feel the same if he sold a few shares of the company? What if he was only a minor shareholder, or only owned a single share? I care more about the company doing it because they are marketing to like-minded people. Toxic views like that shouldn't be validated, and we still see Christians cling to the franchise because of it.
I see the behavior of the owner as separate from the running of the business. I care more about the behavior of Nestle (privatizing water in developing nations), the beef industry (climate impact), and Starbucks/Amazon/others (union busting) because their negative impacts are built into the business model. I'm comfortable saying nearly everyone with that much wealth is a piece of shit and resent them all equally. I'd happily see their companies nationalized or carved up and given as equal shares to the actual workers, but that's a different conversation.
I don't eat Trash-Fil-A. There's nothing special about yet another unhealthy fast food chicken sandwich: it's no better than McDonalds, and Wendy's and Culver's are easily better.
I also refuse to give a cent of my considerable salary to any business that overtly promotes Christianity, in actions or money. (Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Salvation Army, which they do fund, are both unsavory organizations with noteworthy criticisms on Wikipedia.) I would also not spend money at Hobby Lobby for that reason alone, even if they hadn't gone so far as to be involved in illegal art smuggling (and funding terrorism in the process) or fought in court against insurance covering contraception. Nor would I spend money at In-And-Out, were they nearby, for the scripture they hide under the rims of their cups.
Their food quality is consistently higher than their peers in their price range. I know plenty of LGBT individuals who eat there and plenty who've worked there. The company itself is fine and honestly a model for how fast food companies should run. Dan Cathy can go fuck himself, but at this point boycotting CFA strikes me as being as petty as conservatives banning Heinz ketchup because of John Kerry's wife. It's not like Hobby Lobby taking cases to the Supreme Court on its own behalf.
The individual restaurants are not owned by Cathy; they're owned by the individual operators. If knowing that a portion of that revenue stream eventually makes it's way to him makes you uncomfortable, then by all means eat somewhere else. Do good where you can. As far as the moral grandstanding goes, as another commenter pointed out, if the standard isn't necessarily with the company itself but rather with the owner then just keep in mind that that is a very slippery slope into hypocrisy. You have no way of knowing what most privately held companies donate to and you can guarantee that at least some shareholders in every publicly traded company use their profits to fund terrible causes. Drawing the line at the CEO is arbitrary.
I live in Washington state and feel internal dismay every time a new restaurant is opened here. I have never eaten there and will continue to spend my money elsewhere. I feel the same way every time I pass a Hobby Lobby. They don't deserve my business.
One of the upsides of capitalism is that we’re up to our eyeballs in options for most basic consumer goods. If a company publicly goes out of its way to make the world a worse place, it takes zero effort to spend our money elsewhere. If I want a crappy fast-food chicken sandwich, I have at least half a dozen options almost anywhere and probably 20+ in a city, their products all but indistinguishable. Not giving my $10 to a company that’s on record for doing things I find awful is as easy as making a left instead of a right in the same strip mall parking lot. Sure the next giant corporation probably isn’t sparkly clean, but if you’re gonna go out of your way to publicize your toxic opinions the way Chick-Fil-A has for a long time, I’m happy to give my disposable income to the other jerks.
If I have to choose between two fast food chains that do shitty things with their profits, I'd at least rather go to the one where the employees seem to relatively enjoy their job.
And as I live in Atlanta, there are more CFAs here than anything.
I will never eat at CFA, though I know people that do, despite not approving of the Cathy family's actions. Just depends on if people want to vote with their wallet / consumption habits or not. For me, the chicken sandwich isn't worth it, and is easily avoidable. But, you just have to pick and choose what works for you. My grocery budget is a lot better with shopping with Walmart/Amazon, though I know supporting either of those businesses (or most consumer-facing corporations in general) means supporting awful things indirectly, and that sucks. I do specifically choose to avoid conservative (and especially Christian conservative) businesses where I can.
According to Snopes, the WinShape Foundation, which was founded by the Cathy family, is still run by them, and
receives almost all of its funding from Chick-fil-A, and for several years provided funding to several Christian conservative groups and projects, and funded the NCF (National Christian Foundation).Though the ties aren't crystal clear (some original reports got some things wrong, see Snopes), there are NCF-backed groups/projects with anti-gay views that operate in places like Uganda, and were active around various times Uganda has attempted to pass a death penalty for homosexuality.
Update: according to a couple of articles, and wikipedia, it seems that "official donations" from Chik-Fil-A to WinShape have potentially mostly stopped, though Chik-Fil-A leadership still personally give to those types of causes. To me, this is a distinction without a difference. If you get rich from your Chik-Fil-A business and personally donate to awful causes- I still don't want to fund you by proxy (CFA)
Wikipedia has an overview of the entire thing.
tl;dr - Chik-Fil-A stopped donations to organizations that fund anti-LGBT causes (mostly to stop the PR nightmare probably). However, this does not signal a change in leadership's views, and buying from CFA still lines the pockets of people that personally support anti-LGBT causes.
I hesitated trying CFA for a long time because of their LGBTQ+ stance. Finally did as it was the only thing around, wife and I were super disappointed! Chicken, spiciness, waffle fries and sauce were all garbage. Didn't even bother finishing it.
I can't understand this. IMO they are top tier.
I can't understand how others like it. It's "top tier" bland.
Coming from the Midwestern U.S., I didn't even know Chick-fil-A existed until I moved south. I'm not the target market since I won't buy chain food if I can possibly avoid it. [If you've seen the back end supply chain for restaurants, you'll have a pretty good idea that chain food ingredients are mostly the lowest quality humanly manufacturable, right next to hospital, school cafeteria, and prison food.]
But I reflexively avoided Chick-fil-A in particular because there was a performative "Real ChristiansTM eat here, they're closed on the Sabbath" vibe among the people I worked with, even before the news broke about the anti-LGBTQ+ funding and political activity.
The trouble with selecting U.S. businesses based on political contributions alone is that many businesses contribute to and participate in organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is not politically neutral and works to undermine nearly every regulatory effort of public benefit. Or they contribute to both major parties equally, for purposes of maintaining influence regardless of who's elected. The Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby examples are particularly toxic, but even "progressive" brands are still playing the game.
There's no 100% moral win to be had in this environment. Trying to consume less manufactured, processed material is your best bet, followed by doing your homework to find the "least worst" and consistently choosing that option. [I follow the "Zeno's Paradox" theory of hopefulness - that if you keep choosing the "least worst" option, you'll eventually arrive at "good".]
I live in (and grew up in) the Seattle area. the first Chik-fil-A around here opened in 2015.
people, I assume mostly transplants from the South, camped out in the parking lot in order to be there for the grand opening. that was my first exposure to "oh wow, Chik-Fil-A is apparently A Big Deal"
that original location is right next to a highway/arterial cloverleaf. at the time, I was working in an office building on the other side of the freeway, with a birds-eye view of the madness.
it was a hilarious trainwreck. a long line of cars would form, and sometimes it would go over the highway overpass, resulting in a traffic jam because the cars waiting in line would get in the way of the onramp & offramp traffic. the only thing that kept it from becoming an even worse shitshow is that the biggest line would happen during the lunch rush, and it would dissipate by the time evening rush hour rolled around.
the gas station across the street had a sign saying "no Chik-fil-A parking - WE WILL TOW".
eventually they hired off-duty cops to direct traffic.
after the long lines died down, I tried it. fast-food-wise, it's not bad. the chicken nuggets are good, and I am a firm believer that waffle fries, by maximizing surface-area-to-volume ratio, are mathematically provable to be the ideal fried-potato delivery system.
when I read about their anti-LGBTQ stances, I stopped going. apparently they've been trying to clean up their image, and they're now merely hardcore evangelical Christians, rather than vocally anti-LGBTQ hardcore evangelical Christians? good for them, I guess, but I'm not particularly swayed.
the only thing that I think Chik-fil-A does uniquely better than any other fast-food place is the dipping sauce. they have a couple, but the original "Chik-fil-A sauce" is the only one I really liked. it's a honey-mustard-ish sauce, but with an additonal umami/smoky flavor that almost tastes "cheesy" (in a good way)
if there's a Trader Joe's near you, they sell a condiment called Incredisauce that is a dead ringer for that Chik-fil-A sauce.
But this isn’t true - they have a lower SAV than fries with the same width as the waffle rungs. Decreasing fry width (e.g., shoestring fries) increases the SAV even more.
Also, I always found their waffle fries very under seasoned.