No judgement from me. I rarely get it either but in my case it’s because I try to eat healthier. I mostly eat stuff I make myself from groceries (and yeah, it’s also cheaper).
Now, if I was eating fast food multiple times a week then this might represent a greater disruption from what I’m used to.
But will the pricing be based on item popularity, or restaurant traffic level?
I’m thinking the logical use for this is ramp the price of every item by 20% during the lunch rush. Then drop them all back down to “sticker price” all afternoon then bump them all back up right at the dinner rush. And do that but double if there’s some special event nerby like a parade that has the walk-in line running around the building.
They won’t label what they’re doing as transparently as that, but that’s the goal. Not to make e.g. a Wendy’s double-burger the same price but discount the chicken-whatever sandwich until it’s selling as well as the burger.
Once total digitalization made this kind of real-time price flexing feasible, I suppose it was only a matter of time before some major chain tried shaking that nickel bush.
I gotta say, though, that as inconvenient and price-gougey as such experiments may be, I have a hard time lumping them in with behavior I’d consider actually evil. This thread’s got murderers, and politicians who mock murder victims and mass-shooting survivors, and malignant antivaxxers telling lies about celebrity deaths, and various terrorists, and cruel bastards deliberately harming the poor and oppressed…
…and Wendy’s executives planning to try out “surge pricing”?
Um, okay.
Years ago there was a bar that tried something similar. The bar was called The Exchange (IIRC) and was stock-exchange themed. Each time someone ordered a beer, it changed the price displayed and charged for that beer.
I thought it was a cool idea. Make drinking fun and all that.
As long as, like the market, the price went both up and down. Wendy’s goals are rather more one-way.
Yeah, I love me some cheap beer. At a local restaurant with a huge number of drafts, I always order one brewery’s beers that are hideously under priced. Friends have told me they’ve never heard of the brewery. I know the back story.
The “brewery” is owned by the owner of the restaurant. He brews beer as a hobby. Selling his own beer for $2.50 a pint pays for his hobby, so he drinks for free. He is actually doing a pretty good job, and we have similar tastes in beer.
So surge pricing for fast food counts as evil? Was this meant for a different thread?
“My heart goes out to the family, as I’m sure they’re sad that the filth they thought of as their child is dead.”
There isn’t enough suffering that could be visited upon this man that would make me feel sorry for him.
Someone posting (on Nextdoor, go figure) was bitching about their local Wendy’s eliminating ordering food at the counter. Supposedly you have to put in your selection at machines located near the door.
They’re getting so technologically advanced that soon I’ll have to look elsewhere when tempted to get a Double Artery-Clogging Super-Cholesterol With Cheese Burger and fatty fries for lunch.
The last time (admittedly about a year ago) that I went into a McDonald’s, this was the only method by which to order your food. I thought it worked rather well.
women who wear shorts deserve rapings
also belongs in several other threads about stupid/evil/religion
Gotta say, surge pricing isn’t a new concept at all. Tollways and ridesharing (Uber/Lyft) are two examples already in use. For quite a while now, London has been collecting a congestion charge from folks who want to drive in certain parts of town at certain times (though I’d guess that’s more about managing traffic and less about increasing revenue).
Is Wendy’s being greedy? Sure, but that’s capitalism. I have a tiny business myself, and I charge as much as I possibly can, too. Is it evil? Probably not.
That’s how it will work at Wendy’s.
From the article:
The Daily Mail also reported on the new pricing model, stating that based on Tanner’s new plan, the chain’s popular Dave’s Single quarter-pound burger – currently priced at $5.95 in Los Angeles – could see as much as $1 increase during lunch rushes and could dip during slow periods.
If it didn’t go down then there would be no “surge”. If they just raised prices and kept them raised, that’s just the normal price adjustment that all fast food places have done since the beginning (and regular restaurants for that matter). The fact that they expect prices to go up and down dynamically is what is novel about this plan.
Will it work or blow up in their faces? My prediction will be “blow up in their faces” but I could be wrong.
True, we’ve had that sort of thing for years in this area for what they call “hot lanes”, where you pay to go into a lane that is less congested. In some cases that lane is free to carpool vehicles, in other cases everyone has to pay (it depends on where they are). There are also some lanes that are free to drive in for everyone during “off” hours. During commute times they are as cheap as 50 cents but can go up pretty high (I think $15 is the max or proposed max). The prices adjust based on how much traffic there is.
I’ve just never seen it at a fast food place.
Oh, by the way, people around here largely hate those hot lanes, they consider it price gouging by the state. They were put in places where traffic was bad and are obviously a way to raise revenue, but some see it as a paradoxical situation where the worse traffic is, the more money they make, thus disincentivizing them from making real traffic improvements. So if this is the model to go by, I don’t think this is going to go over well at Wendy’s.
IMO …
If the base price is published at $5.95 and it only goes up from there during lunch and then returns to $5.95 mid afternoon and at all other hours, there’s no “price also goes down”.
If it’s $5.95 published base price, except when it’s $6.95 at lunch and $4.95 at 9pm when the store is empty, then there’s “price also goes down”.
The article (based no doubt almost entirely on a corporate press release) is IMO cagily worded to suggest the latter, while not actually saying it and leaving complete room for the former. Which is what I fully expect they’re actually intending to implement.
And yes, ref other posters, this isn’t evil like murder is evil. But it is annoying. Maybe belongs in a rants thread.
Will there be a “base price”? I’m not sure if there will be. I guess it would make sense that there would be. Maybe it says “$5.95” on an ad with an asterisk then in fine print says something like “price subject to increase during peak dining hours”.
I assume that the alternative would be that they would instead raise the base price to, say, $6.45 and keep it there. Either way they are going to raise costs due to higher wages and supply costs. This just does it in a way that gives consumers the potential of an item being cheaper during some hours.
If Wendy’s really thought “higher prices are better” then why not make a burger $20? The obvious answer is that if they did that, nobody would go there anymore. The same logic applies to any sort of pricing. If the end result of “price surges” is that their menu costs more than the place across the street, then that will kill their business. Hence, “blow up in their faces” (which if you recall was my prediction anyway).
It wouldn’t make any kind of financial sense to only increase costs and not have any kind of corresponding decrease. What would be the advantage in that? That would be dumb.
No, the only way they’d even consider this would be if you have a situation where the base price of items is cheaper than competitors. You get lured in because on paper it looks good. And then when you get there and it costs more, you buy anyway because you’re already there. Plus, this also means that during off hours, when the prices truly are low, they might get more customers than their competitors. So the guy wanting a burger at 4 PM gets a deal because it costs less than it would at Burger King. It’s the same logic behind “Happy Hour”; make prices cheaper during non-peak hours, you get more customers. That clearly works or you wouldn’t see that still being done for so many years.
Agreed. “Sales” have been a thing since retail was invented.
The change here, and it’s but one of many all over the retail world for years now, is that the base or published price no longer being the highest possible price you’d pay before coupons, happy hours, discounts, sales, whatever, but instead it becomes the lowest price you’ll pay after added service charges, surge pricing, extra charge for dine-in or for delivery (or both), etc., etc.
The usual corporate error IMO is they think they can bait and switch and since you’re already at the store you’ll grumble and pay up and that’s the end of that transaction and they’re $1.25 richer than otherwise. Yaay them!
They forget this is an iterated game to use game-theoretic parlance. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Lotta consumers are not going to like this when it first bites them. And those folks will vote with their feet and their wallet next time.
Wendy’s hope has to be that BK, McDs, etc., immediately follow suit. Their worst nightmare is they very loudly and proudly don’t.
I would guess that at least part of the goal is to try to shift some of the demand to off-peak hours so as to make better use of resources. Utility companies do the same thing with electricity rates, and it’s resulted in customers changing how they manage their energy consumption such that the peak demand is lower and they don’t have to create additional generating capacity. The same idea should work for roadways - and maybe it also makes sense for Wendy’s? Maybe prices get better for everyone, on average, if they don’t have to have a bigger sales area or kitchen just to accommodate a couple of hours of extremely high demand that only happens at lunch and dinner.
In any event, the customers will vote with their wallets on whether the new system is better or worse, and Wendy’s will abide by their decision or go out of business.
I’m glad that they are willing to experiment.
I think that’s why it won’t work. But if I’m wrong and it does work, then we might be seeing everyone else doing it too. Fast food places plagiarize all the time… Think of “value menus”, “kid’s meals”, “super size”, and so on. Each time it started at one chain, worked, and then they all did it. When it doesn’t work, it goes away.
Bingo!
Wendy’s isn’t going to go out of business. They’ve been around for a very, very long time and are all over the place. If they could weather Covid they can weather a bad marketing decision. But it could certainly hurt them if it goes badly, for certain.