Oddly enough, the Popeye’s closest to me started selling the sandwiches a week or so before corporate officially started promoting it, so the fact that this was supposed to be a huge deal kind of took me off guard.
When Popeye’s first announced the sandwich, it didn’t gain much traction until the world-renowned jackasses at Chick-fil-A felt the need to intervene, because apparently they’re the only ones allowed to make chicken sandwiches. Popeye’s quotetweeted them with a classic example of a “corporate clapback,” where the carefully orchestrated social media accounts of multimillion dollar corporations act sassy in order to seem likable and relatable to their consumer base.
It worked like a charm. Popeye’s made $25 million in sales from sandwiches alone within days of sending that tweet.
We can’t give too much credit to Popeye’s, though, because the real magic behind the movement is Black Twitter’s avalanche of memes.
(Special shoutout to this guy, who, upon investigating the rest of his account, just seems to really hate bread?)
As sales continued to skyrocket, Popeye’s stock of chicken began to dwindle. Customers were… less than pleased.
Apparently, people are even selling them online, because of course they are.
While it’s just as likely that Popeye’s just wasn’t prepared for the boom in popularity, some have also suggested that there may be a connection to the ICE raids that have targeted the Latinx workforces of several major chicken processing plants.
Are the sandwiches really worth all the hype? In my opinion, yeah. They probably aren’t the best fried chicken sandwich ever, but it is the best fast food chicken sandwich, regardless of how low that bar might be set.
Another side effect of the sandwich wars was that literally every restaurant serving a chicken sandwich chimed in with their two cents, from Zaxby’s to Church’s Chicken to this one particularly sad Arby’s.
And then, there’s this fuckin guy.
Others have also pointed out that if Black Twitter could do this much for a big corporation, imagine what they could do if they channeled that energy towards supporting black businesses.
Because at the end of the day…
I am disappointed you did not draw the line to Chick Fil A being more juiced up with the Illuminati than Popeye’s and sending ICE to cut off their supply chain.
Different thought – maybe just getting press and media coverage, no matter good or bad, is key to winning. Whether chicken sandwich market share or elections.