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.
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.
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.
And here i thought fast food enshittification already happened
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.
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.
I’d be ok with it if it actually dropped below the baseline a similar amount off peak
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing where I used to live was to use it to buy redbull then sell it outside the store.
God damn this is ridiculous. People need to read the transcripts it’s not surge 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.
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.
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 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.
Also, does that mean the worker’s pay also scales along with the prices?
Hahahahahahahaha
No
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.
