Cici's Pizza Files for Bankruptcy

Not everyone loves Cici's Pizza, but you can bet anyone who's walked through those doors remembers the place. Though it lacked the surprisingly depressing backstory of a Chuck E. Cheese, its status as a buffet restaurant that made pizza the star of the show was enough to generate excitement among even the pickiest of childhood eaters.

As you might've surmised from the use of the word "buffet" in the previous paragraph, a viral pandemic isn't exactly conducive to the Cici's business model. So after a year of struggling while other more delivery-focused pizza chains made out like bandits, parent company Cici's Holdings had little choice but to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month.

In terms of the financial particulars, it should be a relatively quick and painless process at least as far as bankruptcies go. The 318 location chain already has an agreement in place to sell itself to D&G investors, Cici's Holdings' biggest lender. They'll continue to operate and support the 308 franchised locations (a further 11 locations are owned by the company itself) as usual in the meantime.

The financial woes of Cici's Pizza are unfortunate for the chain and its fans, but hardly unexpected in the current environment. Chuck E. Cheese had to face the animatronic music with a chapter 11 filing of its own back in 2020, after an attempt to rebrand its delivery and takeout options as "Pasqually's Pizza and Wings" fell flat once diners caught wind of what was going on. With court papers indicating that Cici's typically generated more than 85% percent of its sales from on-site dining (after all, you can't really deliver an all-you-can-eat buffet), the writing has been on the wall.

At this point, it's reasonable to ask if we'll really see buffets again once Covid-19 is behind us. With delivery more ubiquitous than ever, do we still really want to leave home and eat somewhere whose whole business model is predicated on the idea of quantity over quality? Sure, some folks will always find value in that, but is Cici's working with diminishing returns?

With Cici's locations poised to keep operating, that's really a question for another day. Who knows, maybe they'll even pioneer a way to somehow deliver an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. With everything else that's gone on over the past year, you can't rule that out entirely.