https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/chick-fil-as-creepy-infiltration-of-new-york-city

During a recent lunch hour, I was alone on the rooftop of the largest Chick-fil-A in the world. The restaurant, on Fulton Street, is the company’s fourth in Manhattan, and it opened last month to the kind of slick, corporate-friendly fanfare that can only greet a new chain. The first hundred customers had participated in a scavenger hunt around the financial district. At an awards ceremony, the management honored them with a year’s supply of free chicken sandwiches and waffle fries. There were no such prizes on offer when I visited, but from the fifth-floor terrace—on the top floor of the restaurant, which is twelve thousand square feet—I could see that the line to get inside stretched almost to the end of the block. An employee took orders on a touch screen and corralled people through the doors. The air smelled fried.

New York has taken to Chick-fil-A. One of the Manhattan locations estimates that it sells a sandwich every six seconds, and the company has announced plans to open as many as a dozen more storefronts in the city. And yet the brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. Its headquarters, in Atlanta, is adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet. Its stores close on Sundays. Its C.E.O., Dan Cathy, has been accused of bigotry for using the company's charitable wing to fun anti-gay causes, including groups that oppose same-sex marriage. “We’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation,” he once said, “when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’ ” The company has since reaffirmed its intention to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect,” but it has quietly continued to donate to anti-L.G.B.T. groups. When the first stand-alone New York location opened, in 2015, a throng of protesters appeared. When a location opened in a Queens mall, in 2016, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a boycott. No such controversy greeted the opening of this newest outpost. Chick-fil-A’s success here is a marketing coup. Its expansion raises questions about what we expect from our fast food, and to what extent a corporation can join a community.

I noticed that word—community—scattered everywhere in the Fulton Street restaurant. A shelf of children’s books bears a plaque testifying to “our love for this local community.” The tables are made of reclaimed wood, which creates, according to a Chick-fil-A press release, “an inviting space to build community.” A blackboard with the header “Our Community” displays a chalk drawing of the city skyline. Outside, you can glimpse an earlier iteration of that skyline on the building’s façade, which, with two tall, imperious rectangles jutting out, “gives a subtle impression of the Twin Towers.”

This emphasis on community, especially in the misguided nod to 9/11, suggests an ulterior motive. The restaurant’s corporate purpose still begins with the words “to glorify God,” and that proselytism thrums below the surface of the Fulton Street restaurant, which has the ersatz homespun ambiance of a megachurch. David Farmer, Chick-fil-A’s vice-president of restaurant experience, told BuzzFeed that he strives for a “pit crew efficiency, but where you feel like you just got hugged in the process.” That contradiction, industrial but claustral, is at the heart of the new restaurant—and of Chick-fil-A’s entire brand. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Cows.

It’s impossible to overstate the role of the Cows—in official communiqués, they always take a capital “C”—who are displayed in framed portraits throughout the Fulton Street location. If the restaurant is a megachurch, the Cows are its ultimate evangelists. Since their introduction in the mid-nineties—when they began advising Atlanta motorists to “EAT MOR CHIKIN”—they’ve remained one of the most popular, and most morbid, advertising campaigns in fast-food history, crucial to Chick-fil-A’s corporate culture. S. Truett Cathy, the chain’s founder and Dan Cathy’s late father, saw them as a tool to spread the gospel of chicken. In his Christian business book “Eat Mor Chikin: Inspire More People,” from 2002, he recalls crashing a child’s party at a Chick-fil-A in Hampton, Georgia. Brandishing a plush Cow toy before the birthday girl, he asked her, “What do the Cows say?”

She looked at me, puzzled. (Remember, she was barely three.)

“What do the Cows say?” I repeated.

“Moo,” she replied.

Everyone laughed at her pretty good answer, and I gave her a Cow and a hug and whispered the real answer to her. Then I turned to her mother and asked, “What do the Cows say?”

“Eat more chicken!” her mother cried . . . then, one by one, each person quoted the Cows and laughed.

Cathy died a billionaire, in 2014, but the “EAT MOR CHIKIN” mantra has survived. Though the Cows have never bothered to improve their spelling, franchises still hold an annual Cow Appreciation Day, offering free food to anyone dressed as a Cow. Employees dance around in Cow suits. The company’s advertising manager doubles as its “Cow czar.” The Cows have their own calendar. (This year’s theme is “Steers of Yesteryear.”) They’ve been inducted into the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame, and their Facebook following is approaching seven figures. Stan Richards, who heads the ad agency that created the Cows, the Richards Group, likened them to “a guerrilla insurgency” in his book, “The Peaceable Kingdom”: “One consumer wrote to tell us the campaign was so effective that every time he sees a field of cows he thinks of chicken. We co-opted an entire species.”

It’s worth asking why Americans fell in love with an ad in which one farm animal begs us to kill another in its place. Most restaurants take pains to distance themselves from the brutalities of the slaughterhouse; Chick-fil-A invites us to go along with the Cows’ Schadenfreude. In the portraits at the Fulton Street restaurant, the Cows visit various New York landmarks. They’re in Central Park, where “EAT MOR CHIKIN” has been mowed into the lawn. They’re glimpsing the Manhattan Bridge from Dumbo, where they’ve modified a stop sign: “stop eatin burgrz.” They’re on the subway, where the advertisements . . . you get the picture. The joke is that the Cows are out of place in New York—a winking acknowledgment that Chick-fil-A, too, does not quite belong here.

Its arrival in the city augurs worse than a load of manure on the F train. According to a report from the Center for an Urban Future, the number of chain restaurants in New York has doubled since 2008, crowding out diners and greasy spoons for whom the rent is too dear. Chick-fil-A, meanwhile, is set to become the third-largest fast-food chain in the nation, behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks. No matter how well such restaurants integrate into the “community,” they still venerate a deadening uniformity. Homogeneous food is comfort food, and chains know that their primary appeal is palliative. With ad after ad, and storefront after storefront, they have the resources to show that they’ve always been here for us, and recent trends indicate that we prefer them over anything new or untested.

Defenders of Chick-fil-A point out that the company donates thousands of pounds of food to New York Common Pantry, and that its expansion creates jobs. The more fatalistic will add that hypocrisy is baked, or fried, into every consumer experience—that unbridled corporate power makes it impossible to bring your wallet in line with your morals. Still, there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety. A representative of the Richards Group once told Adweek, “People root for the low-status character, and the Cows are low status. They’re the underdog.” That may have been true in 1995, when Chick-fil-A was a lowly mall brand struggling to find its footing against the burger juggernauts. Today, the Cows’ “guerrilla insurgency” is more of a carpet bombing. New Yorkers are under no obligation to repeat what they say. Enough, we can tell them. NO MOR.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833464)

or moniker.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834543)

In no small part? That is the only part. That is the only reason this author hates it. There is no other reason.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833482)

people aren't careful with words anymore

that's clearly what they meant

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834097)

4m4 minutes ago

Replying to @NewYorker

Have any similar concerns about all the halal meat shops scattered around your rancid city?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833501)

Inherent in the idea of Islam is that Mohammed, the warlord pedophile, was a perfect servant of god. In practice, Islam is far more hostile to gaymos than Christianity. But you're a bigot if you question them, citizen. You may hate only the Christmo.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833519)

(pbuh)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833576)

I'm not a religionmo so I don't really have a direct dog in this fight. But it's fucking absurd that Musbros get to distance themselves from what they themselves believe their prophet did and Christmos are supposed to endure "but lol what about the crusades" as an all-purpose rejoinder.

There is a fundamental difference between a religion whose central figure is a pedophile warlord and one whose central figure is a pacifist executed by the state. Come the fuck on libs.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833640)

it is easily the worst religion in the world, and yet is a sacred cow for libs

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834047)

Having not grown up with "intellectual" periodicals such as this, am I to believe that the remarkably educated middle class of America in the 1950s and 1960s grew up with their version of this trash, or was it better than this at some point?

I might ask the same of the Atlantic (though it's better than the New Yorker) and others.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833544)

and yes it's always been the same dumb kind of (((lib))) worldview but Kerry (I think) was the first time they endorsed a candidate; the political screeching has certainly not been a welcome addition. the idea used to be that sbitlibbery was implied but the magazine was for more sophisticated, aloof discussion of culture and society and not just a reprint of your uncle mortys leninist screed about the evil republican goyim.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1965/01/23/a-sense-of-where-you-are

the atlantic is a different story of sick and sad (((decline)))

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833682)

I feel the same way about the Economist; back when the GloCap free-markets-uber-alles thing was just kind of the substrate on which it existed (and was fairly evenly applied, criticizing the left and the right), it was a good read too. Now that with respect to the United States, at least, they no longer hold one side to any standard at all while reflexively criticizing the other without exception, it’s a lot less informative and interesting.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35839738)

even reading old NYT from the 80s/90s is jaw-dropping. it was actually reasonable half the time, not so long ago.

the question i am always left with is "Did Jews/libs ACTUALLY used to be reasonable, or were they just playing a LONG CON, biding their time, before unleashing the CARNIVALE?"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833703)

Also NY Libs: NO CHRISTIANS IN NYC!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833723)

but lol yeah they're all gonna die and probably won't see it coming

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833802)

That the best you’ve got you feckless libs?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833910)

O THE FOAM MISTRO

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833939)

don't care if it's "prestigious"

I spent one semester there in UG and couldn't wait to get out by the end of it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833933)

I'm def gonna eat at Chick-fil-a on my next trip to NYC now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35833969)

order of nuggets too if you're feeling like a fatass

differing opinions on sauces, but I am a BUFFALOMO

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834142)

much better than mcdonalds

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834256)

milkshakes are delicious, but legit have like 1500 calories because of the heavy cream used. only get them if you really dgaf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834396)

lunch/dinner: spicy deluxe meal, diet lemonade or cookies and cream milkshake to drink, side of chicken nuggets if youre a fatmo.

key is the sauce. my fav is the sweet and spicy sriracha. buffalo and Polynesian sauce also great.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834183)

https://thechickenwire.chick-fil-a.com/News/Chick-fil-A-Sweetens-Spring-with-New-Frosted-Sunrise

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35834203)

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/984842437641240583

"Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35835337)

https://twitter.com/robbysoave/status/984897056765603841

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35836082)

One moar angle:

The official shitlib position is that if someone sneaks over the border, evades capture, and benefits over the course of years or decades then at some point it becomes unethical to deport them and it's somehow retpile's fault for making them live in the shadows. I.e., they side with literal alien infiltrators and are opposed to all means to remove current ones and prevent future ones.

But the creepy infiltration is a chicken sandwich.

Libs what is wrong with you.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35844578)

https://www.prri.org/spotlight/religion-new-york-citys-five-boroughs/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35849964)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35850929)

New Yorker To Christians: We Don’t Want Your Kind Around Here

Evidently, Dan Piepenbring can’t understand why Chick-fil-A is so popular with New York City residents, given the city’s progressive political and social leanings.

By John Ehrett

APRIL 16, 2018

Chick-fil-A, that alluring purveyor of delicious chicken sandwiches and waffle fries, has long been a target in certain quarters. These criticisms have nothing to do with the addictiveness of the chain’s food (a shame, really, because this is a real problem), but its perceived political stances. Most such attacks have stemmed from the chain’s indirect donations to groups that oppose same-sex marriage, and from CEO Dan Cathy’s comments on the subject.

Conservatives are certainly no strangers to boycott campaigns, and consumers have every right to register their values through market activity. Indeed, shortly after this blowup, Chick-fil-A largely stopped making such donations. You’d be forgiven for thinking the storm had passed.

That makes this recent New Yorker article by Dan Piepenbring—memorably entitled “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City”—all the more incoherent. According to Piepenbring’s screed, which lacks content beyond Ewww-These-People-Aren’t-Like-Me, Chick-fil-A’s arrival in the Big Apple “raises questions about what we expect from our fast food, and to what extent a corporation can join a community.” Evidently, Piepenbring can’t understand why the restaurant is so popular with NYC residents, given the city’s progressive political and social leanings. How can this be?

Why People Keep Buying Chick-fil-A

Since he’s having trouble grasping this, I’ll help him out. First of all, Chick-fil-A food is delicious, as anyone who’s ever tasted an Original Chicken Sandwich or a Chicken Biscuit well knows. Second, Chick-fil-A is beneficial to communities because it treats its workers well and screens its franchisees rigorously, ensuring a high standard of quality across all the chain’s restaurants.

Third, Chick-fil-A is a pleasant environment because its employees are friendly and respectful and its facilities are spotless. Also, for what it’s worth, when pressed about perceived “anti-LGBT” stances, the restaurant focused its donations elsewhere. So, by any sensible standard, Chick-fil-A should be a model company for any progressive interested in workers’ rights and community reinvestment. What more could Chick-fil-A do to be one of the “good guys”?

But Piepenbring is having none of it. In perhaps the article’s most ludicrous segment, he criticizes Chick-fil-A’s cow-driven advertising campaigns by “asking why Americans fell in love with an ad in which one farm animal begs us to kill another in its place. Most restaurants take pains to distance themselves from the brutalities of the slaughterhouse; Chick-fil-A invites us to go along with the Cows’ Schadenfreude.”

Two can play at this game, Dan. The fast-food world is indeed full of problematic content: Burger King reinforces norms of patriarchy and feudalism, Wendy’s teaches that a woman’s place really ought to be in the kitchen, Arby’s denigrates veganism and celebrates animal slaughter, and Taco Bell’s chihuahuas perpetuate harmful stereotypes. (I could go on.)

Surely There Aren’t Christians in Manhattan!

The rest of Piepenbring’s “argument” fares no better, although it’s certainly an illuminating look at its author’s unjustified neuroses. He writes that “the brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. Its headquarters, in Atlanta, is adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet.” It must surprise the Christians of New York (or, for that matter, to erstwhile residents of the American South) that they are “infiltrators” in their own community. But in Piepenbring’s world, any outsiders must be shunned.

Not content with the language of “infiltration,” Piepenbring further claims “there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.” Elsewhere, he’s scandalized by the fact that “[t]he restaurant’s corporate purpose still begins with the words ‘to glorify God,’ and that proselytism thrums below the surface of the Fulton Street restaurant, which has the ersatz homespun ambiance of a megachurch.”

Contempt drips from every word of these sentences. None of this amounts to a substantive criticism of the restaurant’s treatment of animals, labor practices, products’ nutritional value, or anything else. It’s merely Piepenbring’s bleating admission that he cannot handle anything reminiscent of the great bugbear of our time: American evangelicalism.

I think this a staggeringly overused accusation and thus rarely use it, but Piepenbring’s article reflects flat-out bigotry—that is, “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own.” Judging by the tenor of his article, his decisive pronouncement—“Chick-fil-A, too, does not quite belong here. Its arrival in the city augurs worse than a load of manure on the F train.”—has nothing to do with Chick-fil-A’s actual behavior, and everything to do with the chain’s perceived religiosity.

In other words: get out of town, you religious yokels, and stop doing such a good job selling chicken. For sheer self-righteous toxicity, this take is hard to beat.

Guys, Your Smug Is Showing

Beyond the glaring deficiencies of Piepenbring’s piece, the appearance of this article in The New Yorker tends to corroborate a particular criticism frequently raised against “elite culture”: it often reflects a smugly unwavering belief in their moral superiority.

It has become de rigueur among progressive writers charged with this “smugness” to allege they’re simply stating facts, that we can’t normalize the status quo, that their ideological opponents are really just that stupid. What’s perceived as smug, the argument runs, is simply the truth, and that’s the end of it. The alleged problem of smugness is just a smokescreen.

Well, for those still curious, this is exactly what smug looks like.

When all’s said and done, though, if Piepenbring wants to run in terror from the Chick-fil-A juggernaut, maybe that’s all right. Let him have his Ben and Jerry’s. It just means more chicken sandwiches for me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3948295&forum_id=2#35858266)