TOMORROW | Noon: College Basketball with Eric Prisbell and Camille Powell TOMORROW | 2 p.m.: Capitals with Tarik El-Bashir
By Dan Steinberg Excerpt From The D.c. Sports Bog
Thursday, March 6, 2008; E02
Dan Steinberg is a vegetarian, so the whole chicken wing thing is lost on him. The concept of free food, however, he grasps well.
Mike Holden grew up in the D.C. area, lived here basically his whole life and has cheered for the Caps the entire time. Heck, his parents' first date was at a minor league hockey game. He spent countless evenings at the Capital Centre, and has fond memories of what used to happen when the home team reached five goals.
"PEET-SUH, PEET-SUH," he remembered the fans chanting. "PEET-SUH, PEET-SUH."
Why Pizza? Because, come the sixth goal, everyone was getting a free pizza courtesy of Jerry's. Holden and his friends and family members have reminisced about those bygone days of Caps fans, lending their voices in joyful solidarity, chanting for free food. And last spring, he got the power to bring those days back. Holden took a job as director of marketing for Austin Grill, and after a successful stint doing food promotions with the Mystics, the Caps called him up. His pitch?
"I said, 'What do you think it would take for us to do a promotion involving six goals and free food?' " he recalled.
The decision was made: Six goals by the home team would mean one free pound of wings the next day for Caps fans with game tickets. The Caps had reached that number at five home games in 2006-07, and Austin Grill braced for at least that number of wing fests.
The first six-goal explosion came on Dec. 8; attendance was a tad more than 14,000. The next day, Austin Grill's seven locations gave out nearly 1,200 pounds of free wings. The second six-goal explosion came on Jan. 1; attendance was 14,547, and the fans began chanting "We Want Wings" after the Caps reached five. The plan was working. The next day, Austin Grill gave out nearly 1,700 pounds of wings for an 11 percent redemption rate.
Monday evening, Mike got a call from his Caps contact, telling him the team already had four goals midway through the first period in front of a crowd of more than 17,000. Before their conversation ended, the fifth goal came. A few minutes later, his dad called to tell him the Caps had reached six. Free wings for all!
Some of the chain's locations ran out of wings during previous giveaways, and so they started storing hundreds of pounds of extra wings off site. Monday night, the crew snapped into action; a marketing meeting on Tuesday was canceled to produce more able bodies, and two Austin Grill operations staffers made a late-night visit to the off-site supply. Mike himself delivered 480 pounds of wings the following morning.
At 11 a.m. Tuesday, ticket holders already were lined up outside the Austin Grill on E Street NW. The Tuesday wait for a lunchtime table at that location usually is five to 10 minutes, but on this Tuesday, it was 45 minutes, with foot traffic roughly double the normal amount. By around 4 p.m., that location already had given out 225 pounds of free wings.
"It was kind of like an assembly line: They walk in, give us their ticket, we give them their wings; they walk in, give us their ticket, we give them their wings," General Manager Stephanie Zaranski told me. "We have a lot of good promotions, but the wings promotion blows them all away."
The final chainwide tally was more than 1,400 pounds of wings.
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