Yes, Chick-fil-A Matters to You. Here's Why.

Sometimes a company’s behavior or stance on something becomes known on their own and folks decide to stop doing business with them because while they won’t go examining a company’s agendas, they won’t ignore them once they are out in the open, either. (Such was the case with my family, and where we bought clothing for our daughter. She favored one chain that had cool, cheap clothes. But we also recalled reading that the chain used sweatshops to make that clothing, which we don’t agree with, so we took our business elsewhere. That elsewhere probably used sweatshops, too. We don’t know. But we weren’t about to ask, either, and that is how most folks prefer it, I think.)

Where this gets tricky is when a company decides to make it known publicly what its views on a non-business issue are. And this is the case with Chick-fil-A. Nobody heard Cathy talking in his sleep when he said he supported a Biblical definition of marriage. He said that in an interview with Baptist magazine in a kind of double affirmation. He accepted the interview. He answered the question. He wanted people to know how he felt about it. And when they did, some of them responded negatively. That’s the way it goes. And frankly, that seems to be how Cathy himself wanted it, despite the fact that his stance on marriage is irrelevant to the quality of Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches. 

I doubt very strongly that Chick-fil-A will feel any significant pain if the entire homosexual community and those who sympathize with it never again eat another Chick-fil-A sandwich. For a lot of these folks, it’s all about sending a message: “We don’t support a Biblical definition of marriage.” That so many subsequently turned out to say, “Well, we do. And we’ll have fries with that, while we’re at it,” shows how strongly the issue slants in terms of demographics. There are, of course, people who don’t care about any of this, and they simply will eat at Chick-fil-A because it’s tasty, regardless of its opinions. Chick-fil-A could come out and say that all blue-eyed people should be exiled to Antarctica, and there will still be some blue-eyed customers who will get a bag of Chick-fil-A to eat on the plane ride to McMurdo Station because darn it, those are some awesome waffle fries.

I think the real point here, personal politics aside, is that companies rarely profit by breaking that cardinal rule of dinner table talk – no sex, religion or politics. (Certainly in the case of gay rights, sex, politics and religion tend to all cross paths, making for an especially volatile topic of conversation.) So when companies do decide to weigh in publicly on hot topics, they invite criticism. Sometimes that criticism doesn’t matter. Sometimes it does. In all cases, though, is it really worth the risk, or the trouble that goes along with it? As a business decision, probably not.

I say this recalling a kind of reverse version of this situation some years ago when Disney announced it would extend spousal benefits to same-sex partners working for the company, and there was a boycott of DisneyWorld that accomplished exactly nothing except driving up park attendance. But sometimes boycotts and protests do wreak pretty awful reputational damage that directly impacts the bottom line (BP, following the spill in the Gulf is a good example), and if you’re running a business, shouldn’t be that what matters? This is why I agree with the main point of Corey Dahl’s recent editorial on Chick-fil-A here on LifeHealthPro, if not the degree to which she used her personal feelings to express it: Chick-fil-A, like any other company, would do well to just leave things go unmentioned so we can all eat our chicken sandwiches and waffle fries in peace.

Frankly, I think the wider business community could learn a lot by following the insurance industry’s example, which makes public statements only to support charitable causes or to explain its own business decisions. Insurers are so often under fire when they haven’t actually done anything wrong that as an industry, it has become very, very cautious with how it behaves in public, because insurers know that if even if they made diamonds rain from the sky, somebody would complain about how much it scratched the paint job on their car. And so, when the industry does decide to weigh in on matters of public interest, especially those with a regulatory bent, they do so through their trade groups, or through individuals, quietly turning the gears to get an outcome that works for them. On matters of cultural interest, insurers typically just stay quiet; it really has nothing to do with their business, so they let it all go because they just don’t need the complication. Having written far more about Chick-fil-A than I ever intended to these past few days, I can appreciate the sentiment. In fact, it’s time for me to follow my own advice and stop talking about it altogether and focus on the fact that I now have a nearly uncontrollable need for some waffle fries.