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?
I’ll go ahead and file that one under Lies Wendy’s Has Told Me.
Uh huh. I have no plans to ever eat anywhere that does. There needs to be a fucking line.
I’m going to wager that the plan was never to raise prices at busy times, it was always to use dynamic pricing to put things on sale and bundle stuff. Hear me out…
This is how dynamic pricing is often used in retail. The sales and bundles dupe you into buying more shit, and that raises your order total.
Wendy’s is not Uber or Lyft. There are MANY options that people have for lunch. If they just raise prices at peak times, people will eat elsewhere.
Nah, I think they were really going to try and introduce surge pricing until they saw how intense the backlash was, then decided to try and walk it back.
Maybe you are right, but I have a tough time giving these giant companies the benefit of doubt when it’s already been shown there was price gouging across the board in the middle of a pandemic.
Oh, I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt. I 100% think this was a greedy way for them to milk as much money as possible out of their customers.
My guess is that a promo strategy would be the easiest way for them to bleed a wallet. I say that because I’ve worked for some big shitty ecommerce companies that have tested this stuff, and their PR materials all seemed to talk about “saving” money.
What evidence are you basing your conclusion on?
The very long, very well established history of corporations fucking people over for more profit every time they thought they might be able to get away with it. Did you forget or are you just asking in bad faith?
So why get pissed at Wendy’s in particular?
Yeah corporations suck but I think you’re right. This plan was just poorly worded. Congestion pricing does not make sense for a market with so much competition.
You’re absolutely right there but I can definitely see some out-of-touch millionaire executive in an office somewhere having the brilliant idea, “We’re gonna be the Uber of restaurants!”
True, but all they said was “dynamic pricing.”
Everyone assumed this was the surge pricing model, but milking a wallet via a promo engine model is what is more common in retail.
Their PR talked about saving money and luring customers in. I’ll wager that an algorithmic promotion engine was the real play. It would pull customers away from the competition during peak hours, and it would make people buy more by thinking they’re getting a deal.
Being suspicious of corporations is great, but it does seem like a lot of people to take any announcement by a big company, interpret it in the least charitable way possible (even if it doesn’t make sense), and then get mad based on the interpretation they came up with.
If people were really against variable prices as a concept, they’d already be boycott every business with a happy hour, but they’re not. They’re just assuming Wendy’s plans to dramatically raise prices and was dumb enough to draw attention to it. And really, even without an announcement, raising prices beyond the rate of inflation doesn’t make sense, because if they’re remotely competent, they’re already charging as much as people are willing to pay. Wendy’s has every reason to believe that just arbitrarily raising prices faster then the industry as a whole will hurt their bottom line.
I feel like Lemmy started out as a place to have nuanced conversations, which was a refreshing change from Reddit. But I feel like the confirmation bias in many communities is pretty aggressive now. Nuanced and pragmatic comments are not what bubble up to the top.
Still not going to eat there lol
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?
Thinking about it more; I guess it all comes down to their marketing or it, as long as their “full” price is still competitive. Limited time offers are good motivators.
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.
This was all just a marketing ploy (source: trust me, bro)
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!”
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.
They will slowly ease their customers into this new pricing idea and then slowly raise the prices higher and higher.
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.
That’s a pretty fast turn around on walking it back. I guess the backlash was intense. Too little too late though, I’m done with Wendy’s. I don’t care how they spin it now, we all know this wasn’t ever going to benefit customers, and the fact that they even wanted to do this is enough reason to never give them my business again.
Kirk Tanner’s only been CEO for 3 weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how many more Mooches he lasts.
Good call. As with every other industry where bullshit rent-seeking has taken hold, the attempted fee tack-on and walkback are an experiment in how far they can go before appeasing customers. It’s about testing waters before wearing people down. Rest assured, the one CEO’s peers have taken note of this noble effort. Eventually, as they see it, one of them will succeed in making it stick, paving the way for them all to do the same. The first CEO to make it stick will get additional bonuses, praise, and a higher level of notoriety within their rarefied circles.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I considered them an upper tier fast food place for decades. Past few years or so they have shit on all that.
They’ve been nearly dead to me for awhile, but they are fully dead to me now.
When a company says its investing millions to offer value they really mean to extract value, hoping us dum dums beleive them.
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.
Coming from 20 years in fast food business, the plan is essentially New Coke. All PR is good PR as they say. They will absolutely see an uptick in business as a result of merely threatening a potential new business strategy they had no functional plan to implement.
Just out of curiosity, as this chain doesn’t exist where I live, what kind of foods does a Wendy sell? And is it better or worse than similar chains?
They sell burgers. They’re better than McDonald’s and Burger King. Maybe a bit better than Sonic or Dairy Queen. Not as good as Five Guys.
Five Guys isn’t in the same category as other fast food chains at all IMHO.
Five Guys provides a different quality of food at a much higher price than McD’s, Burger King, In N Out, etc. If the taste/quality is even close between Five Guys and the others listed, no one should ever consider going to Five Guys it’d be overpriced.
Wendy’s is in the ‘lower cost fast food’ category, not the ‘over the counter burger’ category.
5 guys is like $20 for a burger lol, they are extremely overpriced, and not really fast now that I think of it either. But yea, I’d agree Wendy’s is better than most “drive thru fast food”, but not quite as good as 5 guys.
Fine, let’s talk regional chains then. Better than white castle, not as good as in-n-out or whataburger. Unless we’re talking about fries, because in-n-out’s fries are soggy fried disappointment.
Same tier as McDonald’s and Burger King, but at the top while McDonald’s is the floor.
That said I don’t think Wendy’s is all that great. If I had to choose a left turn for Wendy’s or a right turn for McDonald’s I’ll pick mc dicks 10/10 times. Their “fresh never frozen” and “cooked to order” translates to takes 10 times longer than Mcky Ds.
In my experience Wendy’s is just as fast as McDonald’s. My main complaint is that they’ll often forget to include part of what you ordered. For instance, their taco salad comes with a bag of corn chips in the side, but last time I got one they left it out. That’s just the most recent example, but the pattern has been fairly consistent over 20+ years and many different locations.
The way I think of it that that when you order from Wendy’s, you’ll get something fast, but you can never be sure what you’re going to get.
Similar to McDonald’s. Burgers and chicken nuggets for the most part.
