Pasqually's Pizza & Wings
Emailed on May 22nd 2020 in The Friday Forward
The Hustle featured a newish concept this week that will leave you challenging everything you know about your new favorite local pizza joint.
It might be a Chuck E. Cheese.
A mysterious new restaurant called Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings has been popping up on delivery apps across the US since April, and the food it serves is similar to what you ate at your 8th birthday party. Over the last couple of weeks, customers uncovered the secret.
Pasqually’s is actually a Chuck E.‘s virtual kitchen. It cooks out of Chuck E. Cheese’s regular storefront, shares the same ownership, but it lists the “Pasqually’s” name on delivery services to seem… indie.
This is not exactly a new strategy: In the UK, Waterstones -- a £400m business -- once got caught opening up quaint, one-off bookstores with names like “Southwold Books” and “Stockbridge Books.”
Barnes & Noble has dominated the unbranded bookstore scene for years. Your favorite college bookstore? Probably a Barnes & Noble. Harvard and MIT’s legendary The Coop is brought to you by the chain. Even the Moravian Book Shop -- the oldest bookstore in the US -- is a B&N property.
Roy Street Coffee and Tea was not a neighborhood store. It was a piece of Starbucks’ multibillion-dollar empire (but the coffee behemoth shut Roy down last year).
If you know of any more examples of big chains posing as local shops - share them in a reply.