Sweetgreen’s CFO, Jamie McConnell, recently described the experience of his own customers to the Wall Street Journal. You walk in planning a ten-dollar bowl. You add a protein, a topping, another topping. By the end of the line it’s twenty-two dollars, “and you’re pissed.”
That’s an unusually honest thing for a CFO to say, and it explains Sweetgreen’s problem better than any analyst could. The company wasn’t actually more expensive than its competitors on a lot of items. But more of its menu sat above fifteen dollars than below it, and there was no obvious cheap way in. So people decided Sweetgreen was expensive, and that became the brand.
Sales are falling. Same-store sales dropped 6.2% last quarter, and the company cut its outlook for the year. When numbers look like that, every instinct says: lower your prices.
