BUSI 570 Week 5 Case Study Paper Example

Closed on Sunday: Chick-fil-A and the Biblical Value of Sabbath Rest

Introduction

Most companies describe their values in a statement. A few build a value into the structure of the business so firmly that it costs them something every week. Chick-fil-A, the Atlanta-based quick-service restaurant chain, has closed all of its restaurants on Sunday since its founder opened his first diner in 1946. In an industry where Sunday is one of the busiest days, the decision means giving up roughly a seventh of the week's potential sales. Hess and Cameron (2006) argue that organizations that lead with values achieve performance that ordinary management cannot explain; Chick-fil-A offers an unusually clear test of that claim. This case study reviews the company, the biblical value it displays, Sabbath rest, and the evidence on what that value has meant for its people and its performance.

The Biblical Value: Sabbath Rest

The command to keep the Sabbath appears in both versions of the Ten Commandments. In Exodus, God commands Israel to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, to labor six days and to do no work on the seventh, grounding the command in God's own rest after creation (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Exodus 20:8-11). In Deuteronomy, the command is repeated with a different emphasis: the rest extends to sons and daughters, male and female servants, livestock and the sojourner, so that servants may rest as well as their masters, and Israel is told to remember that it was once enslaved in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:12-15).

The Deuteronomy version is especially relevant to business. The Sabbath was not only a private religious observance; it was a limit on how much work an employer could demand of the people who worked for him. Rae and Wong (2012) describe the biblical view of work as dignified and creative but not ultimate, and the Sabbath expresses both truths: work matters, but it is not everything, and those with power over others' time must leave them room to rest. Jesus' teaching that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27), confirms that the day is a gift for human flourishing rather than a burden of rules.

Christians differ on how the Sabbath principle applies today, and many treat Sunday as a day of worship and rest rather than a strict legal Sabbath. For this case, the value can be stated simply: a regular, protected day of rest, honoring God and protecting workers from unlimited demands on their time.

The Value in the Company's History

S. Truett Cathy opened the Dwarf Grill, later called the Dwarf House, in Hapeville, Georgia, in 1946. According to the company, having worked seven days a week in restaurants open 24 hours, Cathy saw the importance of closing on Sunday so that he and his employees could set aside one day to rest and worship if they chose (Callahan, 2023). Cathy later wrote that the decision was a way of honoring God and directing attention to things more important than business (Cathy, 2002). When the first Chick-fil-A restaurant opened in a shopping mall in 1967, the policy came with it, and it has applied to every restaurant since, including locations in airports and stadiums where Sunday traffic is heavy.

The value is reinforced by the company's corporate purpose, which states that it exists to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to it and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A (Callahan, 2023). The company has also framed the policy in terms that employees of any faith can embrace. In 2017, a company spokesperson described Sunday closing as a matter of getting work-life balance right for team members who hold a variety of beliefs (Callahan, 2023). The value, in other words, is presented both as an act of honor toward God and as a commitment to the people who work in the restaurants.

Stewardship Through the Operator Model

The Sunday policy sits inside a broader structure that reflects the same stewardship theme. Rather than selling franchises to investors who might own many restaurants, Chick-fil-A selects individual Operators, each of whom typically runs a single restaurant and works in it, and the company retains ownership of the restaurant itself. The model concentrates responsibility for each restaurant's team in one person who is present every day, which makes the Sunday policy easier to sustain: an Operator who works alongside the team sees directly what a guaranteed day off means to a sixteen-year-old cashier or a single parent on the morning shift.

The model also limits the pressure that might otherwise erode the policy. A multi-unit franchise investor with debt to service and returns to deliver would have strong reasons to push for Sunday hours, especially in high-traffic locations. By keeping ownership of the restaurants and choosing Operators who accept the company's values, Chick-fil-A removes that pressure from the system. Hess and Cameron (2006) emphasize that values endure when they are embedded in organizational systems rather than dependent on individual leaders; the Operator model is one such system, and it has allowed the founder's value to survive his death in 2014 and the leadership of a new generation.

Stewardship in this sense means more than careful use of money. The corporate purpose speaks of being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to the company, and employees' time is among the most valuable things entrusted to any employer. Treating that time as something to be protected, rather than simply purchased, is the practical meaning of the value.

The Cost and the Results

The cost of the policy is easy to see. Sunday is a heavy dining day for families and travelers, and competitors open seven days a week capture that demand. Yet the company's growth has continued. According to industry data reported by Foust (2024), Chick-fil-A's U.S. sales reached $21.58 billion in 2023, up 14.7 percent from 2022 and up 43 percent from 2021, far ahead of other chicken-focused chains, and the chain ranked first among restaurants in the American Customer Satisfaction Index for the ninth consecutive year.

The policy cannot be credited with all of this success. Chick-fil-A's growth also reflects its menu, its drive-through operations, its Operator model, in which a single local Operator runs each restaurant, and decades of brand building. Correlation does not establish causation, and a company might succeed despite a costly practice rather than because of it. But the results show at minimum that closing on Sunday has not prevented the company from becoming one of the largest restaurant chains in the country, and there are good reasons to think the policy contributes to the outcome.

Why Rest Works: The Research

Research on recovery from work helps explain how a weekly day of rest benefits employees and, through them, the business. Fritz and Sonnentag (2005) followed emergency service workers before and after weekends and found that what people experienced during the weekend predicted their health and job performance afterward: weekends filled with nonwork hassles and little social activity predicted burnout and poorer well-being, while restorative weekends predicted better outcomes. Sonnentag and Fritz (2015), reviewing research on psychological detachment, the experience of mentally disengaging from work during time off, found consistent evidence that people who cannot detach report more strain and burnout and lower life satisfaction, and that heavy workloads make detachment harder.

A restaurant job is demanding: long shifts, peak rushes and the emotional labor of serving customers. A company that guarantees every employee one day a week when the workplace is closed removes a common barrier to detachment, the possibility of being called in. For teenage employees, a large share of the quick-service workforce, a protected day also preserves time for family, church, school and rest. For Operators, who often work long hours six days a week, the closed Sunday is a structural limit on overwork that would be hard to keep through willpower alone.

The organizational effects follow from the individual ones. Cameron et al. (2004) found that organizations perceived as virtuous, marked by compassion, integrity and trust, showed better performance and greater resilience, partly because virtue builds the positive emotions and relationships that make people willing to give discretionary effort. A visible sacrifice of revenue for the sake of employees is a powerful signal of care. A company that closes its doors on its busiest day so that its people can rest tells those people, every week, that they matter more than one more day of sales. Employees who believe that are more likely to bring the warmth to customers that has made the chain's service distinctive.

There is also a social dimension. Gruber and Hungerman (2008) studied what happened when states repealed their blue laws restricting Sunday retail activity. Religious attendance and giving fell, and among people who had been religious, drinking and drug use rose. Their findings suggest that a shared day of rest supports institutions such as churches and families that have value beyond any single business. A company that keeps its own Sunday closed contributes, in a small way, to preserving that shared time in its communities.

How the Practice Compares With Industry Norms

The value stands out more sharply against the scheduling practices common in food service and retail. Schneider and Harknett (2019), surveying hourly service-sector workers across the United States, found that routine instability in work schedules, such as shifts posted on short notice, canceled shifts and on-call work, went along with greater psychological distress, worse sleep and lower happiness, and that these associations were substantial even after accounting for wages. Much of the industry has shifted the risk of fluctuating demand onto workers by keeping schedules flexible for the employer and unpredictable for the employee.

A closed Sunday does not solve every scheduling problem, and Chick-fil-A restaurants, like others, schedule hourly workers around demand on the other six days. But the policy guarantees one fixed point in every employee's week that cannot be taken away by a manager's call or a sudden rush. In an industry where unpredictability is a documented source of harm, that fixed point is a meaningful protection, and it connects the ancient purpose of the Sabbath, limiting the demands of those with power over others' time, to a modern employment problem.

Tensions and Criticisms

The policy is not without tensions. Some customers and venue partners are frustrated when restaurants in airports or stadiums are closed during Sunday events. Employees who need more hours, or who would prefer to work Sundays at a premium wage, have no option to do so at Chick-fil-A. And because the company's founding values are explicitly Christian, the policy has at times become entangled in broader public controversies about the company and its founders' views, which can make it difficult to discuss the practice on its own merits.

A biblical perspective also raises a subtler question. The Sabbath command was meant to protect workers, not merely to close buildings. A company that closes on Sunday but demands unhealthy hours the rest of the week would honor the letter of the value and miss its spirit. The policy is most faithful when it is part of a broader pattern of respect for employees' time, including reasonable scheduling and support for Operators' own rest.

Lessons for Leaders

Chick-fil-A's experience offers four lessons consistent with Hess and Cameron's (2006) themes. First, a value is most credible when it costs something; a stated value that never constrains a decision is easy to doubt. Second, values are strongest when they are built into structures, here a closing time that no manager can override, rather than left to individual discretion. Third, a value can be explained in terms that people of different beliefs can share, as Chick-fil-A has done by framing rest in terms of work-life balance, without abandoning its original religious motivation. Fourth, a value should be judged by how it treats the people with the least power, as the Deuteronomy command does by naming servants and sojourners. Leaders who cannot close on Sunday can still apply these lessons: protecting time off from after-hours messages, limiting mandatory overtime and modeling rest themselves.

A fifth lesson concerns endurance. Values that depend on a founder's personal conviction often fade after the founder leaves. Chick-fil-A's policy has outlasted its founder because it was written into the company's purpose, built into its ownership model and repeated so consistently that customers and employees expect it. A leader who wants a value to last should ask the same questions: where is the value written down, which structures would make abandoning it difficult, and who will tell its story to the next generation of employees? Hess and Cameron's emphasis on embedding values in practices, rather than announcing them, is the practical answer.

Conclusion

For more than seven decades, Chick-fil-A has given up one day of sales every week to honor a value its founder drew from Scripture. The research on recovery and organizational virtue suggests that the practice has served its employees and, through them, its customers and performance, even if the company's success has many causes. The case shows that a biblical value can shape a large modern business, not as a slogan but as a weekly decision, and it invites other leaders to ask what values they would be willing to pay for.

References

Callahan, C. (2023, August 18). Why is Chick-fil-A closed on Sundays? TODAY. https://www.today.com/today/amp/rcna99908

Cameron, K. S., Bright, D., & Caza, A. (2004). Exploring the relationships between organizational virtuousness and performance. American Behavioral Scientist, 47(6), 766-790. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764203260209

Cathy, S. T. (2002). Eat mor chikin: Inspire more people. Looking Glass Books.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Foust, M. (2024, April 8). Chick-fil-A, still closed on Sundays, set another sales record in 2023. Crosswalk. https://www.crosswalk.com/headlines/contributors/michael-foust/chick-fil-a-still-closed-on-sundays-set-another-sales-record-in-2023.html

Fritz, C., & Sonnentag, S. (2005). Recovery, health, and job performance: Effects of weekend experiences. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 10(3), 187-199. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.10.3.187

Gruber, J., & Hungerman, D. M. (2008). The church versus the mall: What happens when religion faces increased secular competition? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(2), 831-862. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2008.123.2.831

Hess, E. D., & Cameron, K. S. (Eds.). (2006). Leading with values: Positivity, virtue, and high performance. Cambridge University Press.

Rae, S. B., & Wong, K. L. (2012). Beyond integrity: A Judeo-Christian approach to business ethics (3rd ed.). Zondervan.

Schneider, D., & Harknett, K. (2019). Consequences of routine work-schedule instability for worker health and well-being. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 82-114. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418823184

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72-S103. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1924