Recently, New Yorker contributor Dan Piepenbring noted with horror that Chick-fil-A, the chicken-sandwich chain that has been rated America’s favorite fast-food purveyor in customer-satisfaction surveys and is slated to become America’s No. 3 in fast-food sales by 2020 (trailing only McDonald’s and Starbucks), has opened its fourth outlet in Manhattan, its sixth in New York City since 2015. “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City” was the headline to Piepenbring’s article.There are about 7,300 fast-food restaurants of every kind in New York City’s five boroughs, according to a 2017 count; so “infiltration” might seem an odd way to describe the mere half-dozen Chick-fil-A outlets in a city of 8.6 million people. But, as has been well-publicized in religious media, Piepenbring wasn’t alarmed at the brute numbers. He was alarmed at the fact that Chick-fil-A is an unabashedly Christian business entity: “Its headquarters, in Atlanta, are adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet.” Oh noes! There’s more: “Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.” And worse: “Its stores close on Sundays.” Yikes! Finally: “Its arrival in the city augurs worse than a load of manure on the F train.” So please, Piepenbring begs his New Yorker sophisto readership, borrowing some diction from Chick-fil-A’s famous “misspelling cows” advertising shtick: “Enough, we can tell them. NO MOR.”
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