POPEYES CHICKEN
THE HOME PLATE OF HEARTBURN
LARGO FLORIDA
I was working across the street doing some design and engineer work and timed my lunch with the folks I was interviewing so we would not loose time. I asked where did they suggest, well if you want fast theres a Popeyes across the street. Ok taking my life in my hand, I crossed the road and ordered one of their five dollar lunches.
They could easily give KFC a run for the money, problem it was downhill and bad. I have no idea what those tenders or nuggets were, since they were cleverly hidden in a pound of heavily seasoned some kind of breading and cement. ( The cement was similar to - Type I Portland Cement; ASTM C150.)
Finding the meat in all that breading was a waste… the red beans were spicy, the cole slaw “wet”. The Coke was OK. Upon returning I asked the help if that place is that bad all the time? The answer I got was most of us won’t eat there. So why did you tell me to go there? Because you wanted fast…food…!
👮♀️ Popeyes — ✮☆☆☆☆ —
LOCATION SPECIFIC — 8700 Ulmerton Rd, Largo FL, 33771 727-599-2048
3071597 — Dec. 9, 2020 — Inspection Completed - No Further Action - 7 Violations
- Board Code: 200 District: 3 Region: 05
- License Type: Permanent Food Service
- Rank Code: Seating
- Licensee: FLORIDA POP LLC
- Business: POPEYES — 8700 Ulmerton Road, Largo (Pinellas county), FL, 33771.
- License Number: SEA6217070
- Primary Status: Current
- Secondary Status: Active
- License Expiry Date: Feb. 1, 2022
- Number of Seats : 54
My quest for a good chicken sandwich. Chicken sandwiches are a hot topic now as all the players want to cash in on Popeyes pushing the envelope with ads and looking for additional revenue with a new gimmick. The double over breaded chicken sandwich. Something to increase their business with concoctions from normally sold shrimp and chicken baskets with biscuits and fries.
Health: A cardiologists delight… designed by Russian Food Experts at the Gorky Food and Espionage Emporium whose Socialist Manifesto motto is “ Once a day till they take you away”.
Problem: The closest Popeyes was not recommended to me by several folks who worked nearby and shunned it as being a dirty location, poor food quality and bad service. Few people know what I do. Nevertheless, I wanted to do a drive by and scope out the location for myself.
They were right, the building looks and is in need of some upgrading.
I did not want to go inside. It looks dirty, not inviting.
They were average when checked and listed by the Kitchen Police.
When it rains you can swim in the sunken drive-thru —
The greeting over the speaker was unintelligible, there was a puddle almost a lake next to the drive in from poor drainage so it holds water and mosquitos. I placed an order for two of the sandwiches, one regular and the other hot and spicy which after two bites the hot was too hot.
I love hot, I can cook in many ways, using Franks Red Hot the American Southern Hot Wings Sauce, Crystal, Huy Fong’s Gastric Zone Killer, from countries like LAO, and Vietnam, Red Chilis, Mexico, Jalopena and Habanero, India, some of the hottest and most foods with chili flavoring even Fong’s California Sriracha, but this was a new level and required a sixteen oz bottle of water from my cooler to flush and put the fire out. Must be Ghost peppers which they promote or the Grim Reaper See Peppers
The regular version was OK, I liked it and dumped the hot one. That was the first visit… What you see in the picture is not what you get. That was the last good one…
The second visit was not so good, I went through the drive in and ordered a regular and pulled over just far enough away and lo and behold I had received something that looked like a lunch leftover from the previous day. Mushy and in bad shape. Wrapped so tightly in covering, it shrunk… they got me… bad management…
When I check a location I don’t complain till I write them up and I generally give the store three chances. This was total failure and I exited the location via the gas station next door and dumped the sandwich in their garbage can as I filled my car up. I’m not willing to go for the third lucky charm at this location. I’ll try another. I expected a complaint that I started a fire in their garbage can.
Corporate Statement: (Corpo-Guano) At Popeyes, we don’t take shortcuts on quality. Our chicken is freshly and expertly cooked. So crunchy. So juicy. So full of flavor. It’s pure joy!
We’re working hard towards removing all colors, flavors, and preservatives from artificial sources from our fried chicken menu items in the US by the end of 2022, and it’s our goal that by that time, our chicken in the US will also have no added MSG. ( ED: You gotta be kidding me, still using MSG? )
Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen complaints contacts:
- Call Customer Care on 1 (877) 767-3937.
- Email Customer Care on popeyescommunications@popeyes.com.
- Visit Customer Care Contact Form.
HERE ARE OTHER CUSTOMER COMMENTS FROM THIS STORE:
Horrible Customer Interaction - The staff members were quite rude when interacting with their customers. I am an easy going person so I can generally tolerate some attitude. However, these two female employees were nothing but rude to the point my demeanor was about to change and not for...More
Food for thought! -Was disappointed in the service from the cashier. She was not helpful or knowledgeable. She just wanted to take the order and be done. This was the first time for my parents as they wanted to go to KFC. My husband and I prefer Popeye's Chicken. Was also disappointed in spending $2 "for literally a 1/4 cup of gravy", KFC doesn't charge for their gravy when purchasing a family meal. So we were a bit imbarressed to say the least.
I did some research; In comparison to KFC your prices were about 20% more; We spent $35 at Popeye's Chicken, KFC it would have been $27. As they are THE Other Chicken place just FYI.
Awesome - I love that chicken from Popeye’s it's always fresh it's always hot the service is awesome you never have to wait really long as soon as you order your food it's right there fresh and hot the manager is so nice.
Nice and Spicy - I was informed that there will be a three minute wait on spicy chicken. No problem who would not want fresh hot chicken. The chicken was great!
Terrible food and very poor value! Never again...I wanted to get Popeye's for dinner yesterday. So my wife made the trip to Largo to pick up our food. She spent over $30- on dinner. The wings, and legs were very small. Some of the wings looked like they were from chicken raised...
Loud, rude supervisor - My husband and I dropped in to this location during a lunch hour this week. There were a few customers but most were waiting for their orders. Two people were ahead of us. The supervisor, I’m assuming she was because her uniform was different and...
No service available ... Too busy to take your order. Be with you in 10 min
Horrible. There were 3 large containers of chicken sitting under the warming trays and yet, there was no one available to take our order and then it took 25 Min to receive the order. My friend came late and waited in line for about 10…
Worst place to go - I have tried this location twice and I'm here to tell you never again. The first time the guy behind the counter put our order in wrong and I had to get my money back. The lady behind the counter was rude as hell.
Stay away - This is the chicken place that never has chicken ready ,never had condiments never has sides ready to order. Customer service is extremely poor. Don’t dare make a sound or a face that you aren’t happy with your service because everyone in the behind the counter are useless…
POPEYE’S FRIED CHICKEN SANDWICH IS BACK
(CNN) On an otherwise placid Sunday in Inglewood, California, the scene at the intersection of La Brea and Centennial was one of barely controlled chaos. Queues of dozens of cars extended in both directions from each angle of the corner, stalling traffic and blocking the entrance to the neighboring shopping center. From every direction, people walked -- even sprinted -- toward their destination: A humble, orange-roofed Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen.
Inside the restaurant, I joined a festive mob of people who stood in a spiral line three layers deep, laughing at their own absurd willingness to spend a perfectly good morning waiting hours for the chance to eat chicken on a bun.
That's why we were all there, of course: To try the internet's favorite culinary meme, Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Nearly everyone in the store had missed the chance to sample it when the chain first unveiled it; I myself had visited three different locations, only to find each of the stores sold out of the item -- before Popeyes announced August 27 it was suspending sales nationwide because of lack of supply.
In the process, Popeyes gave the world a free lesson on how the internet has transformed what was once the relatively controlled process of "rollout" -- that is, the introduction of new products, ideas and initiatives into a crowded marketplace -- into an ever more volatile and high-stakes game. And it's important to reflect on the fact that what causes spicy chicken to go viral is also, fundamentally, what put a reality TV host in the White House. Momentum marketing is the new normal, for consumer brands and for candidates, and the impact on our democracy has already been enormous. And the future implications, as social media becomes simply "media," are incalculable.
Few industries are more experienced at rollouts than the quick-serve restaurant (QSR) industry, which is, after all, less of a food business than a big-budget marketing engine bolted onto a high-test precision logistics transmission. Fast food offerings are developed in labs, fine-tuned in industrial kitchens, sampled in remote individual locations, and a sales range is estimated and contracts are made to suppliers months or even years in advance. Even for a moderately sized chain like Popeyes, which, with more than 3,100 restaurants in 40 states and 30 countries, is around the 20th largest QSR business in the world, the rollout of a new menu item is as complicated and micro-engineered as a military invasion.
THEY BROUGHT OUT CHICKEN, PATRONS BROUGHT OUT NUTS!
The Popeyes chicken sandwich is back and people are losing their minds - And Popeyes thought it had things well in hand. As Felipe Athayde, Popeyes' president for the US market, asserted to The New York Times, "We had very aggressively forecasted the demand, and we thought we wouldn't have any problems at all, at least until the end of September."
But Popeyes didn't account for the FOMO-inducing impact of social media, where the desire to try something is often created simply by repeated exposure to other people's desire to try something. Posts and videos by early samplers sharing the indescribable ecstasy of eating the sandwich prompted others to seek it out and provide their own reviews, which in turn were almost certainly spiced with exaggeration of its deliciousness, because on the Internet, "meh" doesn't drive clicks like over-the-top delight or extreme revulsion.
Before social media, the spike in interest in the sandwich would likely have been within the bounds of Popeyes' projections. Our current age of high-velocity momentum marketing -- with its attendant cycles of hype, swarm, binge, surge and crash -- makes it much more difficult to estimate the lower and upper limits of demand: Attention windows tend to be extremely tight, and anyone seeking to control those windows needs to build massive interest in a short period of time, to take maximum advantage of the period before consumers turn their focus elsewhere.
Naturally, this gives a huge advantage to those with the resources to do saturation promotion, spending to fill the zone with their message to drown out and exclude those of others. But there are options for those with skinnier wallets, like the "fan economy" strategy, which focuses on targeting a narrow but immensely passionate niche in hopes that circumstances shift in a way that causes it to rapidly expand, or the "brush fire" strategy, which microtargets a scattered range of far-flung groups in the hopes that their reactions will coalesce into something that appears all-encompassing and viral (and therefore becomes all-encompassing and viral).
POPEYE’S CUSTOMER PULLS A GUN THERE WERE NO MORE SANDWICHES
These strategies are already in regular use by brands -- but the same effects we've seen on product marketing are also impacting politics. Candidates with deep pockets try to spend heavily early, to seem omnipresent and inevitable -- this was the Hillary Clinton playbook. Candidates with deeply passionate tribal followings — think Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders -- play heavily to their base, in hopes that their low-lying white-hot energy can erupt into other spaces.
And then there are brush fire candidates who try to expand the field of play by hitting a wide array of targets: failed ones, like Beto O’Rourke; more successful ones, like Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg; and the hardest-working brush fire setter in the 2020 field, Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything and seems intent on building her movement a selfie at a time. Given how critical social media has become, all of them are playing the same game as Popeyes, Chick-fil-A and Wendy's.
Back at Popeyes, a woman told me she'd been in line four times -- once during the first wave; the second time in the morning at a different Popeyes, which announced to the crowd it hadn't received its shipment yet; the third time, at this location, only to be shooed away until they were ready to sell at 10:30 -- and she'd been waiting in this line for 45 minutes already and was prepared to wait all day if necessary. Her family, she said, was doing a "challenge" in which every member would eat a sandwich and post their reaction. Her brother had already bought sandwiches for all her relatives in Atlanta, even her grandmother. She was the last to go, here in Los Angeles.
Another man admitted he was skipping out on work to be in line, and noted it wasn't the first frenzy he'd been a part of -- he'd been a regular on iPhone lines back when Apple was run by Steve Jobs, that early Svengali of momentum marketing.
With long lines at a Popeyes, a teen and others encouraged people to register to vote
The first lady to receive her bag of sandwiches offered to sell one for $10 -- "To save y'all an hour." There were no takers, though another customer waved a receipt and jovially shouted, "I got my lottery ticket right here!" The lady left, cheerily shouting "Happy Chicken Sandwich Day!"
An hour later, I and my sons were finally eating our bounty. The breading was light and crisp, the meat tender, the sauce piquant with a lingering afterburn, the pickles refreshingly zesty. It was certainly better than any other fast food chicken sandwich I'd ever had. But, as my younger son pointed out, "We've been here for hours -- this is not FAST food, dad."
He has a point. Is momentum marketing the ultimate expression of the system, or a sign of the system breaking -- or both?