aren't wings like the cheapest part of the chicken already
They WERE, back when they were popular because they were affordable bar food and you finally had a choice other than pickled eggs and peanuts.
But now the price of wings is subsidizing your relatively cheap boneless skinless breast package, because demand for sauce saturated effluvia got high enough to shift the pricing scheme.
Ultimately it’s not a case where like, supermarkets actually just try to screw you for the biggest possible margins, the whole business model is actually kinda marginal
So to maximize their profits, the chicken farm sells as many wings to restaurants as they’ll buy, and packages legs and breasts separately to sell to supermarkets
Supply and demand pressures permeate the entire system. The restaurant sells you wings at the rate you’ll buy them, and they buy them at the rate they can get them to float the chicken farm
Is the restaurant screwing you, then? Not really, they’re just remarkably inefficient
This is also why anti meat people are retards. Chickens eat excess corn and other crops deemed to be too low grade for human consumption, and whatever naturally occurring insects are around.
Meat is a form of recycling