Chick-fil-A hit $23.9 billion in sales while closed every Sunday. Its CEO explains why that won’t change, even if it costs the chain billions

Chick-fil-A has been closed on Sundays for 80 years, and its CEO says he has never even run the numbers on changing that.

“I never have,” Andrew Cathy told NBC’s Today co-anchor Craig Melvin in an Oct.

14 interview for the network’s “Business in America” series, when asked whether he’d ever calculated the sales the chain gives up by staying dark one day a week.

“And that’s being truthfully honest with you, I never have because it’s never something that we’re entertaining.

It’s just too important for us.” Cathy, the grandson of founder S.

Truett Cathy, has led the privately held company since 2021, succeeding his father, Dan Cathy.

He described the policy as a luxury of family ownership.

“We’re not trying to scrape out every penny that we possibly can,” he said.

Being “a private business and a family business,” he added, means “we can make those types of investments because we know it means so much to our team members.” A 1946 decision that stuck The policy dates to the chain’s earliest days.

According to Chick-fil-A , Truett Cathy decided to close on Sundays in 1946, when he opened his first restaurant in Hapeville, Ga.

He had worked seven days a week in restaurants that never closed, and he wanted himself and his employees to have one day to rest, spend time with family, or worship if they chose.

“It was very common back in the 1940s that a lot of places were closed on Sunday,” Andrew Cathy said.

“They wanted to have a chance to take a break—go to church, and for others just to take some rest.” The company has made rare exceptions.

In 2017, Fortune reported that Chick-fil-A opened on a Sunday to help feed travelers stranded at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport during a power outage.