Tracking the Wingconomy. Economics, Extra Sauce.
For centuries, civilization attempted to understand itself through gold, oil and the gross domestic product. An understandable detour. None of those things comes with blue cheese.
WingMath is a database-backed research project exploring chicken wings through restaurant evidence, customizable rankings, menu prices and economic comparisons. It began with Jon’s wing experiment: a provisional shortlist, a methodology and an appetite that had become administratively complicated. It has grown into a shared collection of observations, sources and assumptions that anyone can inspect and help improve.
One wing, indivisible. A ten piece for all!
Wing science powers customizable national rankings, state exploration and ATL 10. It brings together restaurant and reviewer evidence, editorial coverage, cultural history, social visibility and search demand, while letting visitors choose their own priorities. The goal is to make data—and the role of personal taste—visible.
Wingonomics uses the chicken wing as a unit for exploring prices and purchasing power. The Wing Index establishes an experimental price-per-wing benchmark from an expanded menu sample, with equal weight for each eligible restaurant. That shared denominator powers comparisons across stocks, Crispy Crypto and 'Wingflation', alongside traditional restaurant-prices.
Our founding proposition is audacious: a wing can be both delicious and quantified. Divide menu price by wing count and the per wing unit price emerges. Divide again by a regional price index and the napkin becomes a research instrument.
Good wings deserve attention. Big claims deserve evidence. We intend to consume a concerning amount of the former while steadily improving the latter.
Explore the website, read About WingMath, or inspect how the methods work.
This repository contains dated CSV and JSON data snapshots, research annotations, source references, and data documentation. The website, application code, deployment configuration, database credentials, assets, and website Git history are maintained separately. This is an open-data project.
| Dataset | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Restaurant catalog | 1,380 candidates, plus the original 50 identities |
| Reviewer evidence | 89 visits; 87 scored and 2 N/A; 1,403 suggestion groups |
| Menu observations | 6 order prices, with quantities and branch notes |
| State economics | Regional price parities and population for 50 states + DC |
| Equity quotes | 502 dated stock observations |
| Crispy Crypto | 25 source-ranked crypto assets |
| Inflation inputs | Original monthly CPI files and 47 annual inputs, 1979–2025 |
| ATL 10 | 19 contenders, editorial/review evidence, and 42 coded discussion records |
| Social visibility | 76 searches: 64 observed, 12 blocked; 14 complete restaurants |
| Search demand | 50 keywords: 39 supplied averages, 11 missing |
Start with data/2026-09-15, the data dictionary, and the manifest. The manifest records file counts, hashes, source links, and the distinction between observations, normalized identities, aggregates, and analyst annotations.
- CSV files use UTF-8 and a header row. Empty cells and JSON
nullmean missing, never zero. Arrays in CSV cells use JSON encoding. - Values preserve their recorded units and numeric precision. Dollar market quotes are included as inputs; calculated wing conversions and final WingMath rankings are excluded.
restaurants/is a normalized catalog rather than a verified branch directory. Preserve IDs and branch qualifications when joining records.annotations/contains provisional analyst coding, not measured restaurant quality. Social attention, reviews, cultural documentation, and search demand measure different things.- Snapshots are dated observations, not live feeds. This initial edition was extracted from the saved dataset artifacts used to populate WingMath’s database, not a fresh crawl or a live SQL backup.
- Source retrieval times and quote/observation times are different. A missing timestamp remains missing. The displayed crypto source ranks and reviewer ranks are original source fields, not generated WingMath rankings.
WingMath’s original contributions are available under CC BY 4.0, with third-party materials identified separately. Cite WingMath, the snapshot date, this repository, and the original sources relevant to your use.
See CONTRIBUTING.md to submit corrected or newly collected data. This repository is a versioned research snapshot; committing data here does not automatically update the production database.
The expanded menu edition contains 29 eligible restaurant prices across 25 states and D.C., plus three excluded quotes. See expanded-menu.json for the source prices and eligibility decisions. The original six-price snapshot remains unchanged.
The database synchronization workflow checks for curated public-data changes once daily at 12:00 UTC (8 a.m. Eastern daylight time / 7 a.m. Eastern standard time). Its latest successful output is stored under data/current/; Git history preserves earlier snapshots. See SYNC.md for the field allowlist, privacy exclusions, timing limits and failure behavior. Website source is not included.