While it's certainly not the most notorious casual dining restaurant in the United States, the Buffalo Wild Wings menu has been a constant in the country for more than 30 years, providing customers with a different sports bar experience that has now turned into the norm.
The company's latest numbers, however, place the Buffalo Wild Wings menu as being in the middle of a crisis, as the restaurant famous for its chicken wings and sauces' latest earnings report shows a crisis in the making, as their quarterly earnings included surprisingly low profits in 2015.
According to CNBC, the Buffalo Wild Wings menu plunged by an 11 percent when the restaurant failed to meet what was expected in its earnings and revenue estimates last Tuesday, as their quarterly earnings did rise a few cents from the same time last year (namely, it's now $1.52 per share after hitting a low point at $1.49 one year ago).
Also, the Buffalo Wild Wings menu jumped 20 percent, going from $368 million to $441 million in the same period, but it still fell short of what Wall Street had written off as beliefs by a fair margin, as analysts expected $1.63 per share on $452 million.
USA Today reports that there isn't so much a problem with Buffalo Wild Wings' menu, but rather with rising prices in the industry, from the fact that the price per pound of chicken wings rose 41 percent in the past year to how labor costs have also changed in the same period of time.
The first four weeks of the current quarter saw the same-store sales growth for the company slowing down to 4.2 percent at company locations and 1.8 percent at franchised restaurants.
"As anticipated, cost of sales and labor as a percentage of restaurant sales were higher than the prior year which tempered our net earnings growth," said Sally Smith, the company's CEO, after the Buffalo Wild Wings menu announcement. "The price per pound for traditional chicken wings increased 41 percent versus the prior year's unusually low price."
