Here’s some pretty bad news for popular chicken chain Chick-fil-A: less than a month after the fast food company opened its first location in the United Kingdom, it is already closing down.
The British shopping center where the restaurant has its only UK location has been pressured by an LGBTQ rights group called Reading Pride to rethink their decision to allow Chick-fil-A on the premises. And it looks like people behind the Oracle Shopping Center listened.
Chick-fil-A is known for its anti-LGBTQ attitudes, and it looks like some folks in Reading did not want to welcome the franchise to town. To show their feelings, groups protested outside the Oracle Shopping Center in Reading.
In 2017, Chick-fil-A donated over $1 million to anti-LGBTQ groups. The protests caused the shopping center to reverse course and not renew the lease for the restaurant after it had only been in business for a week.
A statement from the shopping center read as follows: “We always look to introduce new concepts for our customers, however, we have decided on this occasion that the right thing to do is to only allow Chick-fil-A to trade with us for the initial six-month pilot period, and not to extend the lease any further.”
Chick-fil-A has about 2,400 locations in the United States. In 2012, said, “We are very much supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that … We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families.”
So there’s no mystery where Chick-fil-A stands on this issue, in case you were wondering.