Fast food restaurant Wendy’s plans Uber-like surge pricing, with digital menu boards that change prices depending on demand
Fast food restaurant Wendy’s plans Uber-like surge pricing, with digital menu boards that change prices depending on demand
The price of a Wendy’s Frosty could soon fluctuate throughout the day as the chain looks to introduce Uber-like surge pricing on its menu.
Fast food restaurant Wendy’s plans Uber-like surge pricing, with digital menu boards that change prices depending on demand::The price of a Wendy’s Frosty could soon fluctuate throughout the day as the chain looks to introduce Uber-like surge pricing on its menu.
I might be ok with this if they also had "ebb" pricing. If I could walk in at 8pm and get a burger for a buck, it might be worth it never to go at lunchtime again.
This, of course, will never happen.
So if they raise prices at lunchtime, when everyone else is also eating (because we're human meatbags that require food daily), they could raise prices due to the higher demand?
Yeah that's a huge turnoff. Part of the appeal of fast food is that you know the cost of the things you like to order.
the first time someone not expecting this surge pricing finds out they have to pay more because it's lunch time, they will not be coming back to wendys ever again
I'd be ok with it if it actually dropped below the baseline a similar amount off peak
spoiler warning: it won’t
And here i thought fast food enshittification already happened
Fast food will always be at the forefront of enshittification. Ghost Kitchens are yet another innovation that takes advantage of the fact that you, as the customer, have no idea how much of a horror show their operation is because they aren’t a physical presence you can just walk into (I guess you could pretend to be a doordasher). You have to put complete faith in the health inspector.
https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg?si=UNBOxVx5mjXCvLqO
Been a bit since I watched this, but I'm pretty sure they discover the health inspectors can't even keep up with them.
And just like that any (s)urge I had to go there ebbed and disappeared.
My thoughts exactly.
Though I rarely eat fast food already, this will be yet another reason not to.
Good thing Wendy's announced this today so I can ignore them forever
No seriously how do they recover from this
They recover by everyone else realizing there's profits to be made, and following suit. Once greedy corpo assholes come up with an idea to fuck the consumers harder, there's usually no going back. Hopefully I'm just being cynical.
I can't wait to be strongly incentevised not to eat out
Imma save so much money
I could see something like this being useful if it was keyed to stock they needed to get rid of. Like they have extra chili or salads, so they temporarily drop in price. They would waste less food which would make them more money, but of course that's not how it's being used...
There's an app called to good to go. Check it out I use it often.
That's exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote that!
Dave would be disappointed!
There is no way this would hold up in my country if they are advertising prices and you get there and the price is more from a legal perspective. They would not be able to advertise if they did this. Also we don't have Wendy's...
Sure they can "Wendy's lunch menu, up to X" or "Wendy's night snack, as low as Y"
I imagine it'd be handled kind of like how McDonald's "1,2,3 Dollar menu" doesn't have a single item under 2 dollars in my area.
Apparently the backlash was strong enough, that they have announced that they have "abandoned the idea."
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68427039
I suspect they're just going to stick it in a drawer and try again in a couple years, without a massive announcement beforehand
They will still do it as planned. They were morons for bragging about it. Papa john's already let's you pay like $2 or $3 during peak to have your delivery bumped to the top of the list. But they sold that as a feature Wendy's isn't offering you anything but the chance to get fucked over.
Maybe they also looked at how much it would cost to update every Wendy's with digital signage when they barely have enough money to staff the stores.
Oh. They have the money. They just don't want to spend any of "their" profits.
I’m hungry but can’t afford to eat right now because we are in surge pricing.
The thought reminds me of the Carl’s Jr machine in Idiocracy.
machine buzzes you are a bad mother
I feel like this would only work if all the other fast food places did the same thing... please, please don't do that! Seriously, if it's peak time like lunch, why would I ever pick Wendy's, which is now super expensive, or just get shitty food from the other place a block away for half the price?
Also, it's going to be even more insulting when they no longer offer the cheapest items they have today, which I will assume will never be this low again, even at low points of the day. I really hope this campaign is a huge failure and the people who pitched it are fired because I really don't want to see a future where this is possibly the standard one day.
Imagine sitting in front of stock like ticker menu. Wife yelling BUY LOW, and you watching the cents drop.
I saw that post yesterday actually. It was a cartoon posted somewhere here.
Oh! That's what it was about. Thank you.
Diamond hands
I can't imaging having to check the time before going to a fast food joint to avoid "surge pricing." (Fast food prices are already in rip-off territory.)
Couldn't be any easier to avoid though - we'll just cross Wendy's off our list entirely and problem's solved, with absolutely no negative impact on us.
there's a lesson that I learned in college that I still follow today: never eat lunch at lunchtime. unless I'm traveling I'm not eating at peak periods anyway so I really wouldn't be affected by this pricing change.
I still don't like it though. unless that wendy's is the only game in town (literally) this isn't going to be good for business.
What do you mean when you say you “learned” to not eat lunch at lunchtime? We’re you punished?
Getting lunch at 12:30: long lines, long wait times, too many people, waste most of your break time.
Getting lunch at 11:30: short lines, get food quickly, avoid the crowd, eat sandwich at a park and enjoy the sunshine.
Who's gonna go to a restaurant where they never know how much it's going to cost? Stupid idea.
If they had discounts it would work. But we all know they aren't having discounts.
I feel like the easiest way to stop this bullshit is for states with EBT programs to take away Wendy's ability to charge EBT cards.
Wanna dabble with surge pricing? Fine, but you'll lose all your customers that are on welfare.
Wow, I didn’t know that some states allow fast food to be purchased by a EBT card. Can’t get away doing that in the south.
You have to be homeless. Where are they gonna prepare food? Sidewalks aren't exactly sanitary
I don't think you can buy any fast food with EBT...? I'm actually surprised they let you buy soda with EBT. EBT doesn't pay sales tax so they limit what you can spend it on.
I didn't think you could get hot/prepared food with EBT? When I was on it, I couldn't even heat up a fucking sandwich in the gas station microwave before paying for it.
Maybe workers would be able to upcharge rude customers, at least.
My local Wendys is busy often.
This just means I'll never go. Let alone... Pretend I might?
Guess I'll buy puts on WEN.
Great, I cannot wait for not eating it there, like I always do.
There's a lot of talk about the backlash making them go back on their decision, and how stockholders weren't happy seeing the consequences, but I'm wondering how many people actually went to a Wendy's just to be nosey and ended up buying something because prices hadn't changed and they were already there, and how many more people will go now that they know prices won't fluctuate at all.
It almost feels like this helped them just by having people talk about it.
Their twitter guy would've been pretty funny with this whole thing.
God damn this is ridiculous. People need to read the transcripts it's not surge pricing.
What are you talking about? Just because they aren't calling it "surge" doesn't mean it's not surge. Unless you're just saying you prefer the term "gouging"?
In a statement Wednesday, Wendy’s clarified that “dynamic pricing” will include new menus that could offer discounts at slower times of the day, denying the company will raise prices during peak demand.
Lowering prices, also known as "discounts," and then restoring prices after the "discount" can be understood in reverse: prices go from "normal" to "increased".
Given the fact that they (like every other fast food company) always charge the absolute maximum the market will bear, then any price -- even a reduced one -- is still going to be what they calculate to be the maximum. The fact that the maximum is different at times of "increased demand" is exactly what surge pricing is.
You're 100 percent right and to go even further that dude must be naive if he thinks they won't use it to squeeze as much profit as they can.
Well dynamic pricing and surge pricing in practice are the opposite. Both raise prices.
Surge pricing raises it on peak times while dynamic does it throughout the day and usually during off-peak times to subsidize on peak times.
Surge pricing is vastly different than dynamic pricing. Surge pricing has not chance of working in retail when competition exists.
Dynamic pricing is done in retail already and no one bats an eye at it.
Tesla does dynamic pricing. Fuel stations do dynamic pricing.
Energy companies do surge pricing. Uber does surge pricing.
When there's a monopoly on a market you wouldn't do dynamic pricing.
But also it's why heavy regulation is done.
Uber broke this model because they get to operate as a monopoly while gouging their customers.
I'm not defending Wendy's but as someone in pricing this is a vastly different thing and is 100 times worse than dynamic pricing.
I haven't read the transcript of the earnings call, but I read the article(s) and the Wendy's blog post in response.
It seems like there was indeed some misunderstanding somewhere along the way, in that the "dynamic pricing" that was referenced was not to be construed as surge pricing in any way, and was intended to reflect decreased (ebb? discounted? receding?) pricing that would be presented during off-peak hours to drive business.
The practice in itself isn't inherently bad, but I can see this as an incremental move towards true surge pricing across the industry - which for the record I am against - and there isn't really a way to position it in such a way as to be seen as a benefit to the consumer.
As with everything else, customers will vote for this practice with their wallets, and by the state of several other industries in which similar models have been adopted and begrudgingly accepted as the norm, I'm not holding out a lot of hope for a positive outcome here.