Uh huh. I have no plans to ever eat anywhere that does. There needs to be a fucking line.
Coming soon a quiet price hike followed by timed “discounts” at every Wendy’s location.
I can’t understand why they didn’t start it this way in the 1st place.
In the UK most pub chains do 2 for 1 main meals Monday to Friday in late afternoon - early evening.
It’s probably what it would’ve been, but the marketing guys weren’t able to get ahold of this message before it leaked out.
It basically suggests as much in the closing statements. That’s exactly what they’d do.
This panic story doesn’t even make sense. So as soon as it starts to get busy and they start to make good money they’ll raise prices to drive people away?
People heard “dynamic pricing” and immediately assumed “surge pricing.”
Dynamic pricing, especially in retail, is often used to milk your wallet another way - sales, promos, and bundles. You’re incentivized to buy more.
Given that the press release talked about providing value and incentives to come back, I will be money that this was an algorithmic promo engine. Wendy’s will still get more money from you, but that’s because they want to manipulate your purchasing behavior, not raise prices at noon.
Thinking about it more; I guess it all comes down to their marketing of it, as long as their “full” price is still competitive. Limited time offers are good motivators.
So, not surge pricing but slump pricing. I agree the marketing value, but I think the urge to offset the revenue reduction by raising the “standard” or non-discounted price will prove irresistible to the bean counters.
What I think they meant to have rollout is to potentially raise their prices across the board and then offer discounts at off-peak times.
Functionally it’s the exact same thing as what leaked but is way easier to sell as value added to potential customers.
Yes. Theoretically they can drive people away and make more money if the people they haven’t driven away spend more for less goods.
Let’s imagine on a normal lunch hour I sell 100 burgers at lunch for $4. If I raised my price to $4.50, I’d only sell 80 burgers. If I raised the price to $5 then I’d only sell 50 burgers If a burger costs me $3 then I normally make $1 a burger, but at the middle price I make $1.50, and $2 at the high price.
100 burger x $1 = $100 profit
80 burgers x $1.5 = $120 profit
50 burgers x $2 = $100 profitThe trick is figuring out how changing price will affect demand without pissing all your potential customers off. Restaurants already do dynamic pricing with Happy Hour and Taco Tuesdays etc. They give a “discount” to entice more people to come in when they are less busy.
If they make the same amount by selling less units that makes a hell of a lot more sense.
The average person probably wouldn’t notice besides “damn inflation making stuff expensive”, and they may lose a small percentage of their customers, but if the price difference makes up for it then they’re golden.
Still not going to eat there lol
Oh, so it’s going to be (inflated) full price with permanent discount, and Wendy’s gets to decide how much to discount based on need?
Lol. Fuck’em. It’s just extra steps to raise prices.
This was all just a marketing ploy (source: trust me, bro)
Well, put it aside.
It turns out that “we want to charge you more for eating at a normal time” was a poor choice for the fast food restaurant. Who knew?
This clarification comes a bit too late. A lot of people might still be under the idea that they’ll implement surge pricing as it is commonly used by Uber, so more expensive during lunch, since this news came out a day ago.
Ah yes, Wendy’s is using the silicon valley method of enshittifying:
- Make an announcement so grotesquely bad it gets a huge backlash
- Roll the announcement back saying you were mistaken or there were no plans to actually do it
- Wait a bit
- Announce the less awful but still awful thing you actually wanted to do and let the public think “Well it could be worse!”
Prices are going to be going up to compensate this failure. They were going to try a slow roll out of higher prices anyways then add surge on top of it to make the higher prices feel like a deal outside of a surge.
Like I said yesterday it’s too late for me. I know me never eating there again won’t make much of a difference, but it’s all I can do.
I’ll go ahead and file that one under Lies Wendy’s Has Told Me.
They will slowly ease their customers into this new pricing idea and then slowly raise the prices higher and higher.
BACKLASH WAVE!!!
