Fast food joint Wendy's to implement "Surge Pricing"
(archive.is)
Comments (72)
sorted by:
Grocery prices going down?? What are they smoking lawl.
Yah for real. Everything at both grocery chains by me is higher than ever. I started going to Target just for milk, because it's half there. $3.00 instead of $6.00.
Everything is doubled since start of covid. Pack of hawaiian sweet buns (32 buns) used to be 3 dollars, now its over 6 dollars. Cheap beef cut like flank steak was 4 dollar a pound, now its 8 plus dollars. Pack of pepsi (32pack) used to be 9.99, now its 15 plus dollars. Minimim 50% price hikes if not 100%.
And the funny thing are retards who will vote for 10000% inflation if it also includes promoting faggot stuff or have abortions. Single issue voters.
Yeah we've learned you can get half the country to vote against their wallets, as long as you hollar 'abortion rights!'.
Voting is a scam meant to push the blame for government actions onto the peasants. It's just gaslighting.
More like zero issue voters. They vote the way the party and MSM tell them to. I asked a guy why he'd wanted Clinton to win in 2016. I swear I saw an NPC's brain crash in real time, when I insisted he tell me why he wanted Clinton to win, without mentioning Trump even once. He'd obviously voted Clinton because the media had scared him with "Orange Man Bad", but he didn't have the faculties to even be honest with himself.
I've seen this too. Right after 2020 I was in a gas station that I stop at regularly and I've seen the lady at the counter a million times. I catch the end of a conversation she's having where she's shitting on Trump. So as she rings me out I ask her
And the bitch bluescreened. She went kinda slack jawed and deer-in-headlights staring right past me for about 8 or 9 seconds before shaking her head and stammering out "I just.. I don't like him. I DO NOT LIKE THAT MAN." And that was it.
If you hold a very strong opinion, but are unable to articulate why you believe it, then you are likely a victim of propaganda.
Yet those 100% price hikes still exceed the price hikes of most fast food slop.
Went on a road trip a few months ago and we decided to stop at a 5 guys. I had never been. $45 for two people. (Although we could have probably split the fries, I was not aware it would be that much.)
Obviously it's Greedflation™ by Big Grocery.
It doesn’t matter who you vote for when the fed continues to exist.
I am now seeing boneless chicken breast on sale for 1.99 a pound more frequently when prior it would rarely drop below 3.99.
That seems absurdly cheap. That shit was $6/lb for me, I'm pretty sure, pre-COVID.
Ok it's $5.50 , but that's still a lot more than what you're saying.
Maybe relative to McDonalds.
I'm gonna start this by saying that I've observed more price increase in fast food since 2020 than I had in all my years previous. Now it's apparently gotten so bad that the traditional means of disguising price increases aren't working and fast food joints are coming up with "clever" (read: "retarded") ways of disguising their price increases. Wendy's has decided that they're going to increase prices (because I guarantee the baseline pricing for this isn't going to be lower than current prices by more than a few percent) based on demand fluctuations throughout the day.
This makes sense (to some extent) in an Uber where the service you receive during a "surge" is likely to have higher associated "costs" for the driver (traffic, namely) and you're on your phone getting a quote before accepting the service, allowing the "surge pricing" to act as a means of smoothing demand and compensating the driver for additional labor.*
With fast food, unless the majority of your customer base is ordering through an app, the service received is completely incomparable. It costs the same in materials and labor to make a burger during high demand as it does during low demand (and I'd argue it probably actually costs less during high demand since you can make multiple burgers at the same time with less labor than if you spread that same number of burgers out over a longer time.) And as far as I know fast food chains generally don't implement increased compensation for employees based on working during high-demand hours (they just try to have more employees available during these times), so compensation for labor isn't part of the increased price.
For fast food, increasing prices during a "surge" also isn't going to smooth the demand curve, it will just lower it. People aren't going to plan ahead to adjust their mealtimes with fast food, they'll just pick another option. Why even go into a Wendy's for lunch if you don't know what the price will be? Just go to the Burger King across the street.
I can't think of anything I've seen this dumb in the fast food sector ever.
*I don't actually use Uber so I'm making some assumptions about how specifically they implement surge pricing.
It’s not quite equal because good Fast food branches will increase the number of employees during those “surge” times as well (lunch time, dinner, etc).
Now the cost has to be averaged over the whole day but if you can surge the price by 50 cents during lunch they can offer 25 cents less during lower times.
In a pre-COVID world where people still went to offices and ate out for lunch this would work. Not so much today.
Frankly they don’t even need ai for this, let alone computers. Places used to do this by hand with separate lunch and dinner prices.
Lunch and dinner prices make sense when you make food to order, not when it's made by assembly line. Fast food was invented specifically to undercut sit-down restaurants.
Fast food assembly lines allowed them to deliver at scale better than regular restaurants, true. But lunch and dinner prices (as well as different/restricted menus) are practiced by both types for the same reason, economics. McDonald's franchisees hated having all day breakfasts even though corporate insisted it brought in more people and that only reverted when Covid came along. My local McDonalds has certain items that are only available during prime business hours and not after a certain time. The prices have also been changing on at least a weekly basis if not more often as the price for my Saturday breakfast burrito habit keeps changing. Honestly - I can't see Wendy's or any other restaurant truly implementing "surge" pricing and this is just a euphemism for intra-day price changes to get on the buzzword bingo chart, with AI tossed in for good measure. How's it going to work with 20 people in line and person #9 gets his burger for $5 but person #10 gets charged $9 for theirs and poor person #20 gets charged $13!!
Except that makes no sense. They make a lot more money during peak hours - it's more expensive compared to profit to stay open during the slow hours, because costs stay roughly the same while income falls dramatically. Their best profit hours are the same hours they want to increase prices on, they just think everybody is fucking stupid.
I support anything that makes people question why they eat garbage goyslop.
Maybe a few will take this as an opportunity to make better lifestyle choices.
If wendy's were raising their prices for some other reason than the fact that the ingredients are through the roof, that could help people. As is, people may in fact not eat at Wendys, but if they try to buy healthy stuff at the grocery store the prices will also be killing them. So what you really want is lower prices and people making better choices.
Processed ingredients produced at bulk scale compared to growing fruit and vegetables will always make the former cheaper than the latter which if you're on a budget, makes the difference.
The alternative is state intervention and force to make everyone eat healthy and go to the gym. But you still have the problem of demand and supply - which if anything will get worse because you only have so much land (and decreasing with solar farms and new housing) yet loads more mouths to feed. Ironically the UK is looking to do this as part of a forthcoming obesity strategy.
Pretty sure UK's obesity strategy is getting rid of livestock and eating the bugs.
I don't think the government needs to intervene but rather stop intervening. They do a ton to promote unhealthy foods primarily because they're paid by big ag to do so. there is a whole government department dedicated to generating goyslop.
All of this is just a big distraction. The only important part in that is "AI" because that was the reason and motivation for this all. To hop on the gravy train with the fancy new thing that all the executives and board thinks is going to REVOLUTIONIZE EVERYTHING.
We are still in the middle of "everything must be AI" part of history, just like every other trend like it that happens every few years and all the out of touch corpo bosses demand it get put into their business model.
Good luck with that. I can already see normies squawk about "false advertising" and "price gouging" the moment they notice prices changing while waiting in line.
Now imagine this happening in an inner city area.
I'll get employee's killed and the company won't even be forced to pay for burial.
It could be a legitimate case of both. I'm sure that's illegal in some places and the lawyers already know where and how to limit the policy.
Someone mentioned lunch and dinner prices, but doing that at a fast food joint will have people questioning why they shouldn't just go to Olive Garden or something.
I like it. Maybe there won't be a line at the drive through.
That said: The only Wendy's surge I'd bother with is the 2am. At which point people don't care. But I'm just saying the main "surges" I've seen at Wendys are when nothing else is open. Then they get a big line because there's a large unmet demand for off-hours food now. Almost nothing is open past 9 post-pandemic. But you still have all the same people that work nights or wake up at 2 pm or whatever.
Post lockdowns. It wasn't the "pandemic" that changed all of this, but the government polices that never should've been followed in the first place.
Nothing bad will happen to the C levels who make the decisions.
Ever hear those stories about hyperinflation where the grocery stores in Venezuela and Zimbabwe had to change their prices every few hours to keep up with the inflation? Yeah, this new "surge pricing" looks like preparation for either massive inflation and/or dollar collapse. My bet is that more big chains will announce similar plans in the coming months,
Good eye!
Wendy's may be talking about surge pricing, but this also positions them for hyper-inflation.
What's weird is that they aren't marketing it as the inverse, ie, happy hours where the prices are "cheaper" (really the regular new price); that's what they've done before. But I guess the health food activists killed the possibility of "happy hours" at fast food places ...
I was going to post this as well. This is a "stupid AI" sales. AI in this case is just a bot with very little database, and say it controls prices. Make sure it doesn't go below a level.
Profit...?
Then when they fail to make a profit, the bot starts recommending who to fire.
I have to imagine the purpose behind this is twofold: sucker investors/execs who don't understand AI into thinking it's a panacea for their woes, and an attempt to do something to survive while inflation and stagnating wages are killing their market.
So, no, not "profit".
There's another step that's being talked about, but isn't publicly known. Every single company wants and has an expectation for an automated place. One guy fixes problems and maintains equipment and that's it. The initial cost is steep, but once you enter all the workers not being there it evens out and becomes a profit in a few years.
But if we can automate the food, do we need the restaurant? Do we need the chain? What comes after? That's what they're really scared of as they charge forward to their own Doom.
Agreed.
They're all looking to roll back Henry Ford's plan of paying the workers enough to become customers. They expect the market to continue unchanged even as they strip out employees and paychecks from it, like climbing a rope into the sky and pulling it up after yourself.
Since most fast food places are owned by the same company, and work the same way, having several restaurants in one small area makes sense.
You could have a model that learns from previous pricing changes that could be considered AI.
It could, but I doubt they would invest in that. You need a specialized database for that.
I do think that you only really need real time data. That's what they use for traffic pricing. I guess I'm just being argumentative.
There have been attempts to do that with the stock market, and none of them have worked.
I take it Five guys is off the menu for our journalistic friends in this debate now.
No more dollar Frosties?
First thing Monday mornings, when it's -40 out.
Frostys are the only reason I ever ate at Wendy's in my adult life. They also had the Baconator (which is basically just meat, cheese, and condiments between two buns) which I had a couple times as a teenager, but I can't think of any other reason I'd ever have chosen Wendy's over any other option.
Fries. Give me a choice of Wendys, McDonalds, or Burger King fries, and I will pick Wendys, every time.
...god, I miss when I could just eat that shit and not have a care in the world. Amazing what you enjoy when you're young, dumb, and don't know any better.
I'm with you there, and Wendys has also been the one in my life that's open all night. That's one of the few times I actually eat fast food. When you are on the road a million miles from anywhere and you roll through a town past 9pm, you take what you can get. It's not like you can even go to a grocery store.
McDonald’s fries when they are good are way better than any fries in the world
The problem is 99% of the time you just get nasty ass soggy fries instead
I used to think the spicy chicken was really good when I was a young man. But now everything from there just kinda makes me sick. Kind of like Morgan Spurlock from that shit movie, if you don't eat a lot of grease, fast food can impact you pretty negatively.
Actually, I still think it tastes pretty good, but eating it makes the body feel unpleasant compared to eating real food.
That's my perception of McDonalds. Occasionally I'll get breakfast there on the way to the airport and I always feel like I got punched in the stomach about 30 minutes later. For some reason McDonald's breakfast is the only fast food that does that to me.
Wendy's Chili is pretty good.
It's burgers approaching their use by date. Only chain burger place I've really wanted the chili is DQ (which probably does the same thing).
Their food seems higher quality than McDonald's or Burger King, but they don't really have a "hook": Jack in the Box has all day breakfast and a very diverse menu, Burger King floods my mailbox with coupons, Taco Bell is "Mexican", Dairy Queen is the ice cream place, and McDonald's has the name recognition.
Wendy's is kind of just there as an alternate burger joint. Apparently the frosty is some sort of loss leader for them, as they do the coupon books at Halloween and you can get something that gives you unlimited frosties for a year for some silly low price like $5. But honestly, I only found this out recently because I never even think of them when I think of fast food.
I can't wait for the restaurant industry to die.
Like this but with burgers.
So instead of bringing back the dollar menu and having actual value meals, they just inflate the prices during certain hours?
I hope the companies they buy from to get the things don't make also do the same.
Did you think it'd be a top down thing you gigantic morons?
With a revenue boost like that, everyone's gonna put their hand out, and it's your customers who wind up paying more for the same thing. You are only hurting those who actually want to still go there. This is one of the dumbest moves I've ever seen a company pull.
You mean the $5 menu?
The only thing a dollar is going to get you is a couple sauce packets.
Eh. Good riddance. I can't remember the last time I went to Wendy's. Next they're going to install facial recognition that pulls up your income and spending habits to adjust the price based on your income.
They're already planning on doing that here in California for electricity.
Which will just fuck the middle class. The reason really rich people pay insanely low taxes is it all their assets are titled to entities designed to reduce their liability to lawsuits and minimize their tax burden. When a millionaire's personal income is actually zero, because it's all funneled through a trust, they'll end up getting free electricity under this model.
Like micro-transactions in an MMO (cosmetic only or p2w), I don't expect this to preserve the sanctity of the core product because typical people don't attempt first principles.
In an MMO, if I were to have any mtx, it would be limited quantity to be bid on one time only, or on a seasonal basis. It should go w/o saying that a sensible amount of time and skill should remain viable against either type of mtx. Done with care, the company isn't "throwing free money away" while preserving the intrinsic value of the core offering and exclusivity of the mtx. Disclaimer, this is intended as an alternative to prevalent mtx schemes, not my preference for games.
In food and beverage (modern industry in general, too), a bean counter's motivation is demonstrable impact on revenue, w/o taking into account Hazlitt's one economic lesson. The right way instead to do surge pricing is to find a certain threshold of customers where everyone's experience is negatively impacted, but unfeasible to maintain capacity for. Only late customers will be charged extra, until the queue is under control.
One can say this is all a bad idea, but I at least prefer upfront bargaining over bait and switches to get around consumers' (and voters') emotional, shallow thinking. In grocery stores, people have a visceral response to inflation, so brands will instead keep the same sticker price and obscure a lower volume of product. Same category of thinking that has people not presently impacted banning "price gouging" during crises. Due diligence and caveat emptor are facts of life, despite wishful action to the contrary.
AI Clarifies -
I understand your frustration. Surge pricing is a controversial practice that involves changing the prices of goods or services based on the demand, supply, or other factors. ¹ Some people argue that it is a fair and efficient way to balance the market and incentivize customers and providers. ² Others criticize it as a form of price gouging, exploitation, or discrimination. ³
However, it seems that Wendy's is not actually planning to implement surge pricing for its food items. The fast food chain has clarified that its dynamic pricing strategy would only be used to offer discounts, not to increase prices during peak hours. ⁴ Wendy's said that its goal is to use digital menu boards to provide more flexibility and value to its customers, and that it has no intention of raising prices when the demand is highest. ⁴
So, you can rest assured that you won't have to pay more for your favorite Wendy's meal, unless the cost of ingredients or other factors change. Wendy's has always been about providing high-quality food at a great value, and it says that customers can continue to expect that from its brand. ⁴
I hope this helps you understand the situation better. Do you have any other questions or topics you would like to chat about? 😊
¹: Surge pricing - Wikipedia ²: Is Uber-style surge pricing coming to fast food? Wendy's latest move offers a clue. ³: Surge pricing at Wendy's? Yes, please! I will only eat the highest-priced Baconator. ⁴: Wendy's Clarifies Digital Surge-Pricing Strategy After Blowback
Source: Conversation with Bing, 29/02/2024 (1) Wendy's denies plans for surge pricing after backlash. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/wendys-denies-plans-for-surge-pricing-after-backlash/ar-BB1j4gAi. (2) Is Uber-style surge pricing coming to fast food? Wendy's latest move offers a clue.. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/is-uber-style-surge-pricing-coming-to-fast-food-wendys-latest-move-offers-a-clue/ar-BB1j09Nq. (3) Surge pricing at Wendy's? Yes, please! I will only eat the highest-priced Baconator.. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/surge-pricing-at-wendys-yes-please-i-will-only-eat-the-highest-priced-baconator/ar-BB1j2bFL. (4) Wendy's Clarifies Digital Surge-Pricing Strategy After Blowback. https://au.pcmag.com/ai/104171/wendys-clarifies-digital-surge-pricing-strategy-after-blowback. (5) Wendy's denies plans for surge pricing after backlash. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/wendys-denies-plans-for-surge-pricing-after-backlash/ar-BB1j4gAi. (6) Is Uber-style surge pricing coming to fast food? Wendy's latest move offers a clue.. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/is-uber-style-surge-pricing-coming-to-fast-food-wendys-latest-move-offers-a-clue/ar-BB1j09Nq. (7) Surge pricing at Wendy's? Yes, please! I will only eat the highest-priced Baconator.. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/surge-pricing-at-wendys-yes-please-i-will-only-eat-the-highest-priced-baconator/ar-BB1j2bFL. (8) Wendy's Clarifies Digital Surge-Pricing Strategy After Blowback. https://au.pcmag.com/ai/104171/wendys-clarifies-digital-surge-pricing-strategy-after-blowback. (9) Wendy’s will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025 .... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/wendys-plans-ai-powered-menu-to-change-food-prices-based-on-demand-weather/.