25% Of People Agree This Fast Food Restaurant Has The Worst Chicken Sandwiches
In a burger-weary world, the chicken sandwich is an option whose popularity just keeps growing. While the chicken sandwich wars may declare a temporary cease fire from time to time, there's apparently no end in sight. As of now, it seems as though Taco Bell, Dunkin' and Starbucks may be among the few fast food drive-thrus not offering some variation of chicken on a bun (though Starbucks does have those chicken paninis.)
While each and every chain crows about theirs being the best chicken sandwiches, there's really no more need to argue about this. Mashed conducted the absolute definitive study on the subject (okay, as definitive as you can be with a data pool of 555 subjects) and came up with the earth-shattering news that nearly half of our survey respondents (and, by extrapolation, the entire rest of the universe) preferred Chick-fil-A. End of story. Except...what if we looked at things from the other way around? Meaning, who's got the worst chicken sandwich?
Time for another survey, we thought, so our intrepid chicken war correspondents went back behind the scenes, this time to determine who's on the losing side of the conflict. We found 656 randomly-selected subjects who were sufficiently bored easily amused dedicated to furthering our fowl fact-finding mission and administered a survey, the results of which...are worth waiting for (at least until the next slide).
In first – and worst – place is a King who'd best stick to burgers
And the winner, or rather, the loser, meaning the restaurant that over 25 percent of those surveyed found to be the worst of the worst when it comes to chicken sandwiches — drumroll, please! Ok, hold the drumroll, cue the "bwah wah wah wah" sound instead, and then let's have a moment of silent sympathy for the biggest loser: once again, it's Burger King. That's right, the same restaurant that brought you the worst fries in all of fast food has also been judged and found wanting in the chicken sandwich department.
To give the King his due (dis)credit, it appears the chain really hasn't been trying too hard to up its chicken sandwich game, unless you count the late entry Hand-Breaded Crispy Chicken Sandwich. This sandwich may well be a decent competitor, but it's only been available in a few test markets so far and chances are that few, if any, of our pollees had ever had a chance to try one. We're assuming that this last-place finish (or first of the worst) is based on its Crispy Chicken Sandwich which is, eh, slightly better than DQ's dismal offering.
The Golden Arches was a very close second
From crown to clown — and with less than a percentage point's worth of difference — was our second-place finisher in Hall of Shame voting, Mickey D's. They were another late entrant to the wars, having been content to rest on their soggy lettuce laurels with the oh-so-so-so McChicken for way too long. McDonald's has been teasing new chicken sandwiches since 2019, yet their first 2020 chicken menu additions were actually breakfast items. Versions of its new Crispy Chicken sandwich have been test-marketing for over a year and will finally be ready for prime time in February, so we'll see if McDonald's moves up (or down) in the rankings.
Between these top two contenders for bottom of the barrel, we've accounted for about 50 percent of our votes. What about the other half of our poll respondents, though? A shocking third place finisher, with nearly 11 percent of the vote, was Popeye's, though it's possible that all the drama surrounding their 2019 sandwich launch may have lost them a point or two. In fourth place, with 9 percent, was Wendy's, whose Classic Chicken Sandwich evidently didn't end the chicken wars. KFC, just shy of 9 percent, was close behind in fifth place, although this may have been before the roll-out of its latest chicken sandwich. Shake Shack came in sixth with 8 percent, while bringing up the rear, meaning, the chain with the least unpopular sandwiches, was, yes, Chick-fil-A! Go figure.
The lone write-in candidate
A handful (just over 6 percent) of respondents went with "other," preferring to use the comments field to express their own opinion regarding who's got the worst chicken sandwich. Surprisingly enough, nobody chose to vote for their school cafeteria. Instead, many said they just didn't know, while others expressed, by varying degrees, their lack of qualification to make a proper determination: "I don't eat at 4 of these restaurants," and another added, "I don't eat chicken sandwiches from fast food restaurants."
We did, however, get one vote that actually named another eating establishment, that being Long John Silver's. Our initial response was, what the cluck? Long John's doesn't do chicken sandwiches, do they? Well, not exactly, although they do have chicken "planks" (tenders) that its menu calls "the fish of the land." We're still not sure who would order chicken at a fish restaurant, but evidently one person did and found those chicken planks to be fit only for walking the plank. Aarrrhhh.