KFC opened a test restaurant in Texas. They're calling it Open House. The concept includes breakfast items and table service.
Table service. At KFC. Someone gets paid to walk over and bring you a bucket while you sit there like you're at a real restaurant. The same company that built an empire on making people pick up their own grease-soaked cardboard is now betting you want a waiter involved in your fried chicken experience.
The breakfast menu is the real tell here. KFC looked at their business model, saw that they were closed during the hours when Americans are most desperate and least discerning about what they put in their mouths, and thought that was the problem. Not the food. Not the concept. The hours.
This is a test location. Which means KFC executives will stand around with clipboards analyzing whether Texans want someone to serve them biscuits while seated. They'll collect data. Run focus groups. Calculate the operational costs of having employees walk food to tables instead of shoving it across a counter. Then they'll greenlight a national rollout regardless of what the data says because that's what the VP of Customer Experience Innovation promised the board eighteen months ago.
Somewhere in Louisville a consultant just finished a PowerPoint explaining why the future of quick-service chicken is slower service and earlier hours. They got paid $400,000 for that insight.
The retail traders are already looking up the YUM ticker. Wondering if this is the catalyst. Trying to calculate the market cap impact of scrambled eggs at a chicken restaurant. They'll convince themselves this is disruption. That table service at KFC represents an untapped revenue stream Wall Street hasn't priced in yet.
It's a KFC that opens earlier and makes you wait longer for the same chicken. But sure, let's call it innovation and test it in Texas where they'll eat literally anything.
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