Find your “TV wall”

Every town in America has a sports bar.

The weird part is, almost none of them are chains.

The biggest, by a mile, is Buffalo Wild Wings. Roughly 4x the sales of number two, which is Hooters (and they’re not really selling “sports”). 

One factor: wings are the perfect franchise food. 

They’re pretty foolproof: a fryer and a dozen sauces. Copy-paste times a million. Then, you fill it up with TVs playing every game at once. 

The other thing working in their favor: when they were growing, TV kind of sucked.

Cable was expensive. Sports packages cost even more. A big flat screen cost about as much as a used car.

But just down the street, Buffalo Wild Wings was full of TVs with every game on.

So you and your buddies went there on Sunday and paid $16 for loaded nachos instead of raiding your own fridge.

It worked for a long time. By 2016, about 1,200 locations and roughly $2 billion in sales.

Then they leaned in hard, at exactly the wrong time.

In 2012, they rolled out a new store design called "Stadia." The goal was to recreate the "sensory overload" of a live stadium. A Jumbotron over the bar. 80-inch screens. 40 to 60 (or more) TVs per restaurant.

By the end of 2015, they'd rebuilt 50 company-owned stores this way.

Just in time for TVs to get cheap.

Suddenly, you can buy your own 40-inch TV for a few hundred bucks. 

Then streaming showed up, and people started cutting cords. 

As for the food: wings still taste pretty good after 45 minutes in a DoorDash bag.

But unfortunately for Buffalo Wild Wings, a little chain called Wingstop was eating up the delivery market, intentionally building tiny storefronts with no TVs.

What gets me is that I felt it before I saw it. About a decade ago, I stopped going to sports bars, and I couldn't have told you why.

I can often see the change in myself, and then it shows up in the news a few months later.

Every business has a "TV wall" — that vulnerable part that’s getting cheaper and/or easier for customers to do themselves. 

Vibe coding with AI is creating a “TV wall” moment for a ton of software.

So try this. Write down one sentence: "If my customers stopped buying from me tomorrow, they would ______ instead."

Then ask: is that thing getting cheaper or easier every year?

If yes, watch out. Find what they can’t replace themselves, and make it stronger. 

The concept is called the “threat of substitutes”, from Michael Porter's Five Forces - but honestly, don’t try to dive straight into Michael Porter. The most readable version is Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta. (It's the business school course without the business school.)

Good luck out there.

Michael

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