US bowling centers

From 2013 to 2022, as Americans consumed more chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday, the number of bowling centers in the country declined with near-perfect fidelity, producing a correlation of negative 0.97. The implication — that wings are systematically replacing bowling as America's sport-adjacent ritual — is either deeply profound or deeply wrong. The bowling industry has chosen to interpret this as deeply wrong. The chicken industry has chosen not to comment.

Super Bowl chicken wing consumption grew from roughly 1.2 billion wings in 2013 to nearly 1.4 billion by 2022, driven by the wing's consolidation as the definitive game-day food and aggressive marketing by the National Chicken Council. US bowling center count declined from over 4,000 in 2013 to around 3,500 by 2022, continuing a decades-long contraction as the industry struggled with aging facilities, rising real estate costs, and competition from other entertainment formats. Both trends reflect the shift from participation-based leisure toward passive, consumption-based leisure.

Every bowling alley that closes is replaced, in the aggregate, by no particular thing — but the data will always find something that grew as it shrank. That something is apparently wings.