The NBA’s Obsession with The Cheesecake Factory

During one of my many, MANY YouTube rabbit holes, I recently came across a video from Eater that posed a simple question:

Why are so many NBA players rabid fans of The Cheesecake Factory?

The love has been pouring in for a while. Russell Westbrook called the brown bread BOMB.COM (he is not wrong). Karl-Anthony Towns regularly takes the team out for some eats at The CCF. Someone created a Twitter account devoted solely to retweeting mentions from NBA players visiting the restaurant.

Sadly, that account appears to have gone inactive, but the passion for The Cheesecake Factory remains.

It really boils down to three big things here: convenience, comfort, and options.

Convenience

The Cheesecake Factory currently owns and operates 308 locations throughout the United States and Canada. The NBA currently has 30 teams.

That means no matter where a player is in the country, the familiar glow of The CCF sign is right nearby.

When you’ve been traveling on the road, doing a grueling trip like seven games in 12 days, knowing you’ve got a reliable option to turn to is a nice perk.

Comfort

That familiarity also breeds a sense of comfort. For the most part, chain restaurants offer consistent quality in their meals (or at least, they’re supposed to).

Presumably, visiting The Cheesecake Factory in Chicago should be an almost identical experience to visiting one in San Francisco.

Sometimes you’re just craving a certain something. If I wanted, say…the Holyfield Taco from Valentina’s (a smorgasbord of brisket, bacon, eggs, and potatoes that is simply amazing), I’d have to be in Austin to get it.

But if I wanted, oh, I don’t know, a strawberry cheesecake and Jamaican black pepper chicken and shrimp…well, The Cheesecake Factory can handle that job.

Options

If you’ve ever been to The Cheesecake Factory, you know their menu is overwhelmingly large. The size of a small novel, but spiral-bound and textbook-esque.

One of my most popular tweets ever was this half-assed bit comparing an agency offering multiple services to the amount of stuff The Cheesecake Factory offers.

In one sitting, you can get avocado eggrolls, chicken Madeira, an Americana cheeseburger, and an Oreo cheesecake…and you’ll have checked off, like, a mere .00002 percent of the menu.

NBA players like being able to pick and choose, just like we do. Sure, they’ve got their favorites, but variety is the spice of life.

Of course, which such consistent support, the stock price of The Cheesecake Factory must be thriving, right?

Oh no, that’s right—the stock market is stupid and makes no sense. So instead the stock price of The Cheesecake Factory has DECREASED by more than 42% over the past five years, despite improvement over 2019 and (obviously) 2020 comps.

Anyway, I’m hungry now. Enjoy your meals this weekend, whatever they are.

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