Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) doesn’t think food from some restaurant chains tastes as good as it used to. To address that, she wants to restrict the rights of private equity firms to buy restaurant chains. The senator is forgetting the check that already exists: consumer sovereignty.
In a social media video this week, Warren pointed to several chains that have been acquired by private equity firms. She focused especially on Jersey Mike’s, which was taken private by Blackstone in January 2025. Warren romanticizes the history of Jersey Mike’s as a mom and pop sandwich shop that pulled itself up by its bootstraps to become a national chain. “Good for them,” she says, with both thumbs up.
It’s just as easy to imagine Warren vilifying pre-Blackstone Jersey Mike’s. The longtime CEO who turned it into a national chain, Peter Cancro, is worth $6 billion. If the circumstances had served her political agenda at the time, she probably would have been juxtaposing Cancro’s wealth with the pay of an entry-level Jersey Mike’s employee and saying how important it was to tax Cancro more and raise the minimum wage.
The senator doesn’t mention that Jersey Mike’s went public again in July. Maybe she isn’t happy with the subs anymore, but she seems to be in the minority. In June, Jersey Mike’s was rated No. 1 among quick-service restaurants for the first time on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
Warren goes on to skewer Roark Capital, the largest private equity player in restaurant chains. Roark has one of the model examples of turning around a restaurant chain: It acquired Wingstop in 2010 and took the fast-casual chicken chain public in 2015 after strong growth. McAlister’s Deli and Cinnabon have been other clear successes, with sales growth far outpacing inflation and competitors.
Would the ebb and flow of the restaurant sector look dramatically different without Roark? Probably not. Roark’s purchases haven’t always paid off: Ice cream chain Carvel and burger chain Hardee’s have not been successful. A 2025 analysis of Roark’s investments by Restaurant Business magazine concluded, “Roark’s track record largely mirrors that of the overall industry.”
That isn’t a glowing endorsement of Roark, which should be outperforming the overall industry if its strategy was working well. But it also means that the radical transformation of the restaurant industry that Warren says private equity has wrought isn’t showing up in the sales data.
Also lacking evidence was Warren’s vilification of private equity in housing, a crusade joined by President Donald Trump that culminated in a law restricting how many single-family homes can be owned by institutional investors. Warren said she wants to apply that same approach to other industries. Rather than crafting industry-wide regulations based on populist anxieties, policymakers should focus on the facts.
When businesses change aspects of their operations, some customers will like it and others will not. Longtime customers might leave and new customers might come in. That’s true no matter what the ownership structure of the business is.
The good news is there’s already a tried-and-true system for gauging how a business’s decisions affect customers: profit and loss. Customers don’t need a senator to decide for them, based on which rich people happen to own the chain, whether they like what a restaurant offers. They can vote with their wallets and hit the capitalists where it really hurts: the bottom line. Or they can keep ordering. At Jersey Mike’s, Blackstone or no Blackstone, we’re partial to the No. 13 Original Italian.
The post Elizabeth Warren’s restaurant crusade leaves a sour taste appeared first on Washington Post.
