This past Fourth of July, while Kentucky Fried Chicken was celebrating Independence Day in the US, KFC Japan was busy commemorating the anniversary of the fried chicken chain’s entrance into the Japanese market.
On this day they held a one-day all-you-can-eat sale where customers could get 45 minutes of non-stop chicken for 1,200 yen. A very generous deal but how much did KFC stand to lose on such an offer, or did they lose? Let’s crunch the numbers and see.
According to quick estimates received by various reports, approximately 34,000 people bought the all-you-can-eat chicken from the 381 participating KFC’s across Japan. Among these people a total of 257,000 pieces of chicken were doled out.
Compared to the same day the previous year 1050% more pieces of original recipe were moved amounting to a total sale of about 40,350,000 yen. This sounds great, but let’s take a look at the same amount with a regular price.
If you break the total amount given out into 3-piece sets of original recipe chicken, then you’ll have about 86,000 sets. At their regular price these sets would cost approx. 71,000,000 yen.
Comparing that to the sales they did on this 4 July, you can easily see that they lost about 30,000,000 yen in chicken sales. Although a considerable amount of money, KFC Japan is content to write it off as their way of saying “thank you.”
We can derive another fun fact from this data. With a time limit of 45 minutes to eat as much chicken as you can, the average person could eat 7.6 pieces of chicken at a rate of one piece about every 6 minutes. Who said math isn’t fun?
Source: RBB Today (Japanese)