wingnightdeals.ca<\/a>, a website that tracks wing night deals at pubs and restaurants across Canada, including here in Calgary. <\/p>\n\u201cThere are different ways that wings are priced, either by wing or by pound\u2026 By single wing probably the range would be anything from 30 to 40 cents to a dollar\u2026 a dollar-ten or a dollar-twenty, maybe something in that range. If we\u2019re looking at a pound of wings, you could go as low as six or seven bucks on the quite low end and probably as high as 14 or 15 or probably even higher in some places,\u201d says Storoschuck.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1790439010_535_default.jpg\")
Roman Storoschuck chowing down on some of his favourite chicken wing flavours at MugShotz in Ogden: Raspberry Chipotle and the Garlic Parmesan. (Emma Kilburn-Smith\/CBC)<\/p>\n
Mike Shupenia owns Side Street Pub and Grill in Kensington. He says the cost of chicken wings from suppliers has been rising, and as a result, he\u2019s seeing more restaurants shift from per-wing and per-pound pricing to half-priced wing deals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEight years ago, all of a sudden our chef\u2019s like, \u2018Hey just to let you know, we\u2019re losing money on wing night now.\u2019 So when you get to the point where you\u2019re losing you\u2019re like \u2018well we\u2019ll bump it up 10 cents\u2019 and then all of a sudden you\u2019re bumping it up to 50 cents and now even 50 cents you\u2019re still losing money or breaking even barely, so half-priced wings were invented.\u201d<\/p>\n
LISTEN | Why ‘wing nights’ aren’t as cheap as they used to be:<\/p>\n
Calgary Eyeopener7:25Why ‘wing nights’ aren’t as cheap as they used to be<\/p>\n
There are plenty of nightly specials on chicken wings around town, but where is Calgary’s best deal? Whatever happened to 10-cent wings? The CBC’s Emma Kilburn-Smith went looking for answers.<\/p>\n
There are a number of factors that influence supplier cost, including tight supply, but there\u2019s more to it than that, according to Kevin Grier, a Livestock and Meat Market Analyst.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He says Canadian demand for chicken \u2014 which factors in the amount that we eat combined with how much we\u2019re willing to pay for it \u2014 is excellent. He also says the restaurant industry and the way it responds to a shifting economy plays a role in determining the cost of meat.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother reason for the volatility of wings is if the restaurant traffic cuts back and that has an impact on wing prices, and conversely, maybe because restaurant traffic is pulling back, maybe the restaurateurs want to entice us back by offering cheap wings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raymond Bucknell is an instructor at the Butchery and Charcuterie program at SAIT. He\u2019s been a butcher for 27 years and remembers when wings were considered a by-product item.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first started, we put all the chicken wings into a five-pound bag and sold them for two or three dollars a pound, they were nothing \u2026 they were just like extras.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raymond says wings have since exploded over the past 30 years, but he\u2019s noticed wing nights are not what they used to be on college campuses, where he works, and where they once used to reign supreme.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents are having a harder time now than ever before \u2026 I think that because wings are more expensive, because things like beer are more expensive, because eating out is more expensive, they probably don\u2019t have the same social value that they used to.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also has a theory for why pub-goers might notice such a price discrepancy between restaurants: it could have to do with where they\u2019re sourcing their chicken from. Some places pay more for local and organic chicken, while some of those really cheap wings could be imported, either from out of the province or from elsewhere in the world, likely South America, according to Bucknell.<\/p>\n
Restaurant owners are about to face another challenge to keeping wing night costs low. Bucknell says they\u2019re expecting the cost of chicken to go up by 25 per cent over the next few months. <\/p>\n
But for some, wing nights will always be a popular social activity, no matter the cost, in large part because it\u2019s about so much more than a tasty snack \u2014 and a good deal. Storoschuck, who devotes a lot of time to tasting and chatting about wings, says he\u2019s part of more than one wing night group chat (believe it or not).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a social thing \u2026 it\u2019s not just going for drinks. Going for drinks is nice but when you add the chicken wings to it, it\u2019s an added factor \u2026 people have their favourite flavours, their favourite spots, and I\u2019m also a big fan of trading wings. I’ll order some and you order some, we\u2019ll switch one and it has this very communal element to it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 5 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":["post-910547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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