This article shows a graph of (raw/unprepared) chicken wing sales over the course of a year, with a big spike around the time of the Super Bowl - the subject of the article.
What’s more striking to me is the graph over the course of the rest of the year - a clear “sawtooth” shape, with sales going up and down on a regular monthly cycle - why is that?
Payday.
I doubt it. I don’t think most people in the US are on the same pay schedule, and in any case the schedule would generally be every two weeks, not monthly. And if it were payday, you would expect a similar pattern in deli sales as in supermarkets.
More likely something to do with the way supermarkets place monthly orders. All or almost all of the peaks are in the second week period in the month.
I thought many salaried people got paid monthly now, with the standard payday being the last day of the month (or the last work day, when the last day falls on a weekend).
I agree that this is more likely than an end-consumer rush on wings, though.
Welfare check.
A lot of things spike at the near the beginning of the month when welfare and SS checks hit bank accounts.
So why doesn’t this affect deli sales in the slightest?
Are there so many people on welfare and SS that it would cause an increase of 25-30% in supermarket sales?
The article mentions that wings are among the most expensive parts of a chicken, so I doubt that the cause is buyers who are using their welfare checks. (Not to mention that there is only a relatively small percentage of the population on welfare.)
Didn’t wings used to be the cheapest part? Guess I need to start working on my buffalo-style chicken neck recipe.
Wings used to be sold along with backs and necks and giblets. The price was chicken feed.
That’s the irony; chicken wings used to be undesirable and therefore cheap, but the popularity of buffalo wings means that they’re among the most expensive parts of the chicken now.
Perhaps it has to do with supply. Maybe butchers get large shipments of wings at the beginning of each month so sales go up, as the stock dwindles over the month sales go down.
That saw-tooth pattern doesn’t make any sense to me.
Wikipedia says “Chickens will naturally live for 6 or more years, but broiler chickens typically take less than 6 weeks to reach slaughter size.”
Again though, I can’t see all chicken farms being synchronized.
Weird.
The peaks are broad enough to actually cover almost a 2 wk period in many cases. Some of that variability could be accounted for by such a broad peak.
Fun fact: the same is true of lobster.
Oysters, too, I think.
Fish, in general.
Dewey Finn:
Raw wings? That doesn’t agree with my experiences.
Perhaps it’s true of prepared wings. They’re a bitch to de-feather, I can tell you that.
I think it just has to do with the frequency of reporting by grocery stores. Some are reporting once a week and one or more of the really large chains is only reporting once a month during that monthly spike.
ETA: If a huge chain like Costco (which sells tons of frozen wings) only reported once a month, it alone could probably account for the spike.
The weird thing about that graph to me, beyond the strange monthly peaks and valleys is that I’d have thought the totals would have gone up during football season- the relatively small number of football games are more of a tv-watching event than baseball, basketball or any other sport with large schedules.
Instead, the graph seems to trail downward in the latter half of the year.
I suspect it’s something like that. You wouldn’t see the same thing with delis because they’re so small.