McDonalds bet that their customers wanted wings. They lost that bet and big!
The fast food giant introduced the Mighty Wing — a bone-in chicken wing priced at $4.99 for five pieces — in September. After a massive promotional rollout, the company is now stuck with 10 million pounds of chicken, nearly 20 percent of their initial order, in frozen storage.
The wings sold well during a trial run in Atlanta, but failed to translate into national sales.
“They underestimated their own impact on wings’ costs,” Wedbush Securities analyst Nick Setyan told USA Today. “Now they have got all this extra supply they don’t know what to do with and they are going to try to force it down franchisees’ throats again.”
McDonalds CEO Don Thompson admitted they made a mistake on the wings, telling investors that the wings were probably too spicy for customers and the $1 per wing price was “not the most competitive.
