Wingstop cuts its outlook as the sales slump drags on
Same-store sales fell 5.4% in the third quarter, a sixth straight quarterly decline, and the chicken wing chain now expects a drop of up to 7% for the year.
Wingstop has cut its full-year outlook again, as same-store sales at the chicken wing chain fell 5.4% in the third quarter, the sixth consecutive quarter of decline. The company now expects full-year same-store sales down 6.5% to 7%, revised from an earlier forecast of down 4% to 6%, Nation's Restaurant News reported.
Net new restaurant openings are also coming in lower than planned. Wingstop now expects 440 to 450 net new locations this year, growth of 14.4% to 14.7%, down from the 15% to 16% growth the chain had guided earlier in 2026.
The comparison itself is not an easy one: the third quarter of 2025 had already fallen 5.6% against the year before. Two years of back-to-back declines point to a slump that predates any single quarter's excuses.
Two years of back-to-back same-store declines point to a slump no single quarter can explain away.
Gas prices and urban markets
Chief executive Michael Skipworth said the recovery is “taking longer than anticipated” and that the quarter's performance fell below the company's own expectations. He said macro pressure on customers “have intensified over the last few months.”
The chain traces part of the decline to its footprint: 55% of its domestic locations sit in urban, lower-income markets, which the company says are more exposed to rising gas prices and tighter household budgets than suburban competitors.
Company-owned unit-level margins contracted year over year for the first time since the first quarter of 2025, as slower sales met a higher cost of goods. Skipworth said Wingstop is “not waiting” for the wider consumer environment to improve before acting.
The unit economics still hold
What the company is leaning on is its underlying model. Domestic average unit volumes stand at roughly $1.85 million, with unlevered cash-on-cash returns of about 60%, figures Skipworth cited as reasons franchisees are still opening new stores even as existing ones cool. For a look at how another chain is managing a similar slowdown, see our report on Jack in the Box's store closures.
Whether those returns hold is now the real question for a chain that spent the past two years adding stores faster than it could keep the ones it had growing.
