I can’t believe this is going to be a winning strategy for Wendy’s, as opposed to just including them and raising the price slightly. I hadn’t even heard of this until recently.
At the last Wendys I was at (just a couple weeks ago in Chicago) while I was in the long, snaky order line I saw no less than 4 people come up with their burger out on the wrapper, complaining that they hadn’t got their tomato. The third person got into a verbal dispute with the drink girl when a sarcastic comment was made by the employee about “people that can’t read”, and the third person in the tomato line threw her sandwich on the counter, announced she was never eating at Wendy’s again, and stalked out. The fourth customer walked up, said “never mind”, and sheepishly went back to her table (but I’ll bet she won’t be back either.)
At which, the assistant manager burst out laughing.
I was working at Bruegger’s when they started charging $.10 for each type of vegetable that wasn’t in the description of your sandwich. Yes, it was a headache, and yes customers complained about it a lot.
I worked at a restaurant a few years back that charged a dollar if you wanted lettuce and tomato on your sandwich. They also charged you a dollar if you just wanted tomato. People bitched-a lot.
I’m a manager at Wendy’s now. A good percentage of the tomatoes we’re getting in are crap anyways. You’re not missing out on a whole lot.
Half the time the sandwich makes put tomato on anyways, just out of habit.
We have a register card available to address customer complaints regarding the issue-I’ve yet to have to resort to using it…
I don’t remember McDonald’s policy on this, but back when I was a teenager working at Burger King, lettuce and/or tomato added to a sandwich that didn’t normally include them (or added as extras on a sandwich that DID) was an additional 10 cents, cheese an additional 20 cents. However, if you ordered your Whopper “hold the tomato” you did NOT get a 10 cent price break. So I think the OP has a point, albeit kind of a piddly one.
me too! same thing happened to me on saturday. Normally, I have to ask for no tomatoes, but seeing the sign, I didn’t bother. Got home w/ my quarter pounder, and there was a tomato sitting right there! It was a really gross tomato, too. Very unripe, but mushy anyway. Shudder…
Well, you know they don’t want you to have them. Ever order the onion rings, and, oh gee, we have to fry up a new batch because we’re out. So you wait. And wait. Finally you say, hey I gotta life here, just give me the damn fries. Well, that happens to me every frickin’ time. And I eat in Burger king maybe three times a year. Mere unlucky chance? Bah! It’s systematic enfrenchfriesment!
There is a song with the line: The only two things that money can’t buy are real true love and home grown tomatoes.
It is a relief to get a mass produced burger without that awful pink styrofoam disk, that lousy excuse for a tomato. Why any one would want one is beyond my conception. Some folks of more sophisticated taste would be willing to pay MacWendy King and extra dime just to avoid dealing with those no-taste horrors. If they can’t give you a decent tomato then to Hell with it.
It’s strange, I think, that Wendy’s seems to be the only place affected by this “tomato shortage.” I see plenty of tomatoes everywhere else, and the hurricanes happened awhile ago. So, either Wendy’s only buys from a limited number of suppliers in Florida, or they are conducting an experiment on us all. To see how much we really want those tomatoes. I hate having to ask for the tomatoes when there is a supposed shortage…does it make me selfish, to take the last tomatoes from someone else?
Tomato shortage? I wish there was a shortage of homeless people walking into Wendy’s and hassling me for money as I’m trying to eat (and then getting pissy when I don’t pony up). And I wish there was a shortage of people walking in and bugging me to buy cheapo artwork or other assorted garbage as I’m trying to eat.
Actually, the El Pollo Loco near my house has a sign saying they are temporarily not offering the house salsa due to the tomato shortage. This is in California.
Also, just wanted to agree that when you do get the tomatoes, they often suck ass. I’d rather have no tomato at all than that mealy, juiceless crap you get sometimes.
But that’s really a problem of shitty employees, not the policy itself. Being rude to customers is never good business practice.
Reminds me of when I worked at Burger King a long, long time ago. A co-worker was telling me about an exchange she had with a customer:
Customer: “This ham & cheese sandwich is cold.”
Employee: “Well you should have ordered the hot ham & cheese.”
Customer: “This place is shit.”
Instead of just offering to heat the sandwich for the customer, she treated her like she was an idiot. And she was actually proud of the way she had handled it.
Huh wha? The price of tomatoes in the supermarket has more than doubled. The prices were pretty normal up until a month or so ago, because we had our usual surplus of yummy gorgeous Jersey tomatoes. But as soon as Jersey tomato season was over, boom! Tomatoes are now running $2.99 to 3.99 a pound, instead of .99 to 2.49 like they usually do. And most of them look crappy. The other day, I saw some great looking tomatoes at 2.49, and I snapped them up like they were the deal of the century.
Actually, I stopped at a Jack in the Box North of Houston the other day and there was a sign stating that sandwiches with tomoatoes were restricted to one slice each until further notice. Have to confesss I had never noticed that there were ever more than one before this.
How is it that people haven’t noticed this tomato shortage and claim now that it’s all a figment of these retailers’ imaginations? Every store I’ve been in for weeks has had signs proclaiming the shortage and apologizing for passing on the high prices to their customers. Almost every newscast for weeks has spoken of the shortage.
Re: canned tomato products
I think canned tomato product sellers can keep their prices low because processed tomatoes sit in tins for months before ever coming to market. So dips and spikes in tomato products for them are rather smoothed out. So if the price of tomatoes is unnaturally high only temporarily, it should affect their bottom line so much.
If these same products were 50% more expensive all of a sudden, I’d think that then I could accuse them of grafting their consumers.
While I doubt we’ll see huge price spikes for the reasons that Sam mentioned, I do think we’ll see fewer big sales on these items. It’s quite common for the stores around here to use canned tomato products as loss-leaders. Frequently, they’re below half price. And if there’s a loss-leader, there’s often an incentive from the manufacturer. While the canned tomato processors may not have to cut supply right now, we can be sure that they’re also not looking to unload warehouses full of Italian-style whole tomatoes in thick tomato puree.