CHICKFIL-A
at colleges around the country—and the two began to talk. “I told him how it was impacting young people,” Windmeyer tells me. “That Chick-fil-a had become a hate symbol. How students would throw the brand’s bags at groups of queer students as they sat in the student union. And Dan just listened.”
Cathy kept calling. There were also invitations: Cathy was meeting with 500 franchise operators in Charlotte, North Carolina, Windmeyer’s hometown—would Windmeyer come and share his story? Would he like to join the Sunday school class for teens Cathy taught and share what it’s like to come out? What about attending the 2013 Chick-fil-a Peach Bowl, as Cathy’s guest? During these hangouts, Windmeyer says the two asked each other lots of questions—about their backgrounds, Windmeyer’s husband, Tommy, and Cathy’s devout belief in Jesus.
“Neither of us could—or would—change. It was not possible,” acknowledges Windmeyer, who continues to advise Chick-fil-a. But he says the listening meant a lot.
Not every critic sees things the same way. Carly Mcgehee is an LGBTQ activist who spearheaded the kiss-ins in 2012, with help from GLAAD. She says people still ask her if they can eat Chick-fil-a’s sandwiches with a clear conscience. “I say, if the chicken is that important to you, be my guest,” she told me from Denton, Texas, where she teaches high school theater. “But until Chick-fil-a says, ‘It doesn’t matter who you love, God loves you’ loudly enough for gay and trans kids in flyover country to hear it, I can’t patronize their business. They have to become more aware of the impact their actions can have on young people who feel alone, unloved, and unsafe.”
In 2019, airports in San Antonio, Buffalo, and San Jose rejected applications to open Chick-fil-a outposts in their terminals due to ongoing worries about the company’s giving. That same year, eight days after the chain’s grand opening in England, its landlord announced that the restaurant would close when the lease expired six months later, calling backing out “the right thing to do.” At this point, Chick-fil-a tacitly acknowledged that its reputation for ANTILGBTQ giving had been impacting growth.
“There’s no question—we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Chick-fil-a’s president and chief operating officer, Tim Tassopoulos, a 46-year company veteran, told the trade magazine Bisnow. Who they are, he explained, is a company that no longer donates to organizations with political agendas, ANTI-LGBTQ or otherwise. The company’s giving arm, the Chick-fil-a Foundation, soon announced that it would donate exclusively to education and fighting homelessness and hunger.
Aghast, Mike Huckabee argued that the brand wasn’t staying out of the culture wars but fighting for the other side. “If Chick-fila believes that the Left is now going to start patronizing Chick-fil-a and saying wonderful things about them,” he warned, “they’ve got to be kidding.”
Huckabee’s reaction portended the broader conservative fury to come. In 2020, as the acronyms ESG and DEI entered the corporate lexicon, Chick-fil-a named Erick Mcreynolds, a 13-year veteran of the company, as its first executive director of DEI. It also started publishing an annual impact report—the latest edition of which focuses on racial equity and climate stewardship— and debuted an animated series called The Stories of Evergreen Hills, a modernized and inclusive Adventures in Odyssey, with the racially ambiguous protagonist Sam and her Black friend Cece learning life lessons from an inventor resembling Whit at Whit’s End.
That summer, the Black Lives Matter movement was in its fullest swing. During an appearance at an Atlanta megachurch, Dan Cathy pleaded for the mostly white crowd to take ownership and fight racism through acts of service. He then knelt at the feet of the other guest onstage—lecrae Moore, a Black Grammy-winning rapper— and began lightly scrubbing Moore’s sneakers with a shoe brush. “If we find somebody that needs to have their shoes shined,” Cathy said, “we need to go over and shine their shoes.”
The stunt made many progressives cringe. Shining another man’s shoes carries historical baggage involving race and class. Yet it stirred outrage among certain conservatives, too, for its deference. The sermon resurfaced again three years later, in May, when Fox News host Harris Faulkner labeled Cathy’s comments “amazingly crazy stuff” and conservative media strategist
Mannarino tweeted out his poll. Podcaster Benny Johnson said Cathy was infected with the “woke Christian mind virus” and that Chick-fil-a had become “the biggest fraud ever pulled on American Christians.” HALF OF ALL AMERICANS SAY THEY HAVE boycotted a brand specifically because it took a political stand they disagreed with. And in today’s charged political environment, it’s easy to become a lightning rod with a single misstep. Just ask Bud Light or Disney. All of this will make Chick-fila’s next moves critical viewing for business leaders everywhere.
If Chick-fil-a manages to thread the needle—succeeding with its growth plan while retaining its bedrock principles and evolving with the times—it will be a testament to the company’s willingness to listen to, and learn from, those who disagree with some of those beliefs. It will also be a function of the freedom it gives operators to engage with their local communities. And then there’s the company’s dedication to service. Good service and good food can overcome a lot of perceived sins in today’s consumer-driven convenience economy.
Meanwhile, the company’s next generation of customers—despite identifying as more politically radical than their forebears—seem largely unconcerned with both the decade-old ANTI-LGBTQ controversy and today’s conservative anti-dei outrage. Investment bank Piper Sandler’s “Taking Stock With Teens” survey, released in October, found that Chick-fil-a ranks as the top restaurant among American teens for the seventh straight year, ahead of Starbucks, Mcdonald’s, and Chipotle.
On a cool fall evening, I returned to Hurst’s Chick-fil-a in Brooklyn to watch the dinner rush. Out on the sidewalk, things felt as Mad Max as ever, with delivery workers zooming by on their e-bikes and idling in cars double-parked at the curb. Inside, the store was relatively empty. Two customers who looked to be in their twenties gazed up at the menu and mulled their options. “Honey pepper pimento—do they do that in the South?” one asked, referring to the newest menu item, Chick-fil-a’s firstever riff on its original chicken sandwich. He paused for a second. “I’m getting it.”