You might not have thought about it, but boneless wings aren’t, well, wings. Like many others, including ourselves, you’re falling for the marketing ploy establishments are pulling by having this item available.

There are several reasons why “boneless wings” get their name, and a major one is that companies can use that term to save money. Over the past few years, the cost of wings has raised to the point that they were actually more expensive than chicken breast (the predominant protein in boneless wings). It has inspired chains like Buffalo Wild Wings to push their boneless offerings and deals to get consumers to eat more of them.

Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison admitted in a recent interview that “it’s a little less expensive for us and so we try to provide a value to our consumers for the boneless.”

It has worked for these chains in two main ways: Not only have consumers been buying more boneless wings, but they’ve ordered less actual wings to the point where prices have begun to drop. That means wing chains can keep pushing the deals on boneless wings while getting the real deal bone-in back at a cheaper price.

How much have boneless wings taken over, you ask? A pretty significant amount, as they make up vast portions of restaurant chains’ wing sales. It’s about 35 percent of wing revenue for Wingstop, according to Morrison, while Buffalo Wild Wings sells more boneless than they do bone-in. They reportedly sold 1 billion boneless wings and 768 million real wings in 2015, showing that for them, these “nuggets” may be the true key to growth.

As long as that is the case, they’ll keep offering boneless wings deals.

Many already recognize them as glorified chicken nuggets, so why don’t these wing establishments just call them nuggets? Well, that’s the marketing ploy that everyone is falling for when ordering boneless wings.

When you think of wings, you think of beer, sports, bars, watching a game and having a good time with friends. Places like Buffalo Wild Wings, Wingstop and others come to mind almost immediately.

When you think about chicken nuggets, however, the image is more along the lines of fast food. It’s the low-quality grub meant for broke college kids and the younger generations, paired alongside burgers and sodas inside of drive-thru establishments. Consumers see the wing joints they go to as steps above that, so were they to sell “nuggets,” they would be perceived as lesser than their boneless wing-toting rivals.

While the two may be the same thing, ordering boneless wings means you’re choosing an entirely different experience that’s more grown-up. By using that naming convention, chains are essentially duping you into choosing their experience, while eating a cheaper item.

It’s a pretty smart and sneaky marketing play, but for now, we’re content to fall for it, if it means we can differentiate between the two.

Originally Published: November 01, 2018