Buffalo Wild WingsFacebook
Most wings fans know how much chicken they like to put away in a sitting so it can get confusing when a place just offers up vague order sizes like small, medium, and large. Like, how many are we talking here?
Now Buffalo Wild Wings has announced that it’s ditching the small, medium, and large wing servings and bringing back wing counts.
Buffalo Wild Wings even admitted on its website that it kinda missed the mark by going to portion sizes over wing counts. “Confusing wing sizes have been benched and we pulled wing counts out of retirement,” the company wrote. “Boneless or traditional. Hot BBQ or Caribbean Jerk. They all come in counts of 6, 10, 15, 20 or 30. So when someone asks you how many wings you want, you can just say 30.”
According to Restaurant Business, Buffalo Wild Wings dropped the wing counts a few years ago to try to save on food costs. Also, executives argued at the time that some customers felt like they were getting cheated because wings can vary in size and the amount of meat on them.
So, in 2013, the company went to small, medium, and large platter sizes, and swore it would factor wing sizes into the whole thing. “If wing sizes stayed at the same place they are today, people would see a five, 10, 15 [or] 20 count as compared to the 6, 12, 18, 24,” the company’s CFO Mary J. Twinem said at the time, per Restaurant Business. BWW decided instead that it would adjust the count if the wings in each serving size seemed to be larger or smaller. “Our new servings will allow us to serve a consistent portion of chicken to our guests when the size of wings fluctuates,” Twinem said.
Apparently this has been a huge issue with customers since then. “We talked to consumers through focus groups and surveys, and consistently heard that, without a wing count, our guests didn’t now what they were getting for the price,” a BWW spokesperson told Restaurant Business. “Following this feedback, we tested wing counts in approximately 100 sports bars across the country to confirm that insight. Through the test, we verified everything we heard in the consumer research: Our guests prefer wing counts.”
Customer feedback at its finest!
