“To clarify, Wendy’s will not implement surge pricing, which is the practice of raising prices when demand is highest,” Wendy’s Vice President Heidi Schauer said in an email to NPR.
Wendy’s didn’t provide many additional details, but it said in a separate statement that the digital menus could allow the company to offer discounts to customers during slower times of day.
Rob Shumsky, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, suggested it could actually mean lower prices for Wendy’s patrons.
“They talked about, for example, getting more breakfast customers in,” Shumsky said. “They might actually reduce breakfast prices at certain times in order to encourage people to come during what they currently have as relatively low-demand periods.”
they’re gonna do the black friday thing where they take a $5 price tag and write
$6above itJc penny effect
It used to be the case in the UK (and maybe still is) that you couldn’t mark something on sale unless it had actually been listed at a higher price for however long. I assume that that kind of consumer law doesn’t exist in freedom land.
We have that in Australia but all it does is lead to inflated RRPs. Now you have to wait for ‘sales’ to pay a reasonable price and if you don’t plan ahead you just get ripped off.
The narrator: “It never means lower prices for customers”
The fuck they think I’m gonna look up breakfast sandwich prices like I look for cheap gas? Fuck outta here.
Bullying works, folks
They’re just going to wait until everyone has forgotten about it then start doing it quietly.
Yeah whenever I hear about some awful business practice I just accept that it’s inevitable these days.
See, World of Warcraft figured this shit out almost two decades ago now. Back in the day, they wanted to encourage more regular, daily logins so they added an “unrested XP penalty” where you would gain less experience points after earning a certain amount every day. Players absolutely hated this. They fixed the problem by saying the initial, normal XP gain was a “rested XP bonus”, while the penalized XP gain was just the “normal” XP gain, while in reality, none of the numbers actually changed, they still rolled out an XP penalty dressed up like a bonus
If they just said “We’ll give you a discount if you show up while it’s dead” while quietly jacking up all the prices, people probably would have loved that shit
Exactly. Green number is good. Red number is bad. You can’t tell people that their burger is more expensive because its lunch hour that’s insane.
This is a well established practice in the restaurant industry too!
“Wendy’s introduces Happy Hour menu” would barely even have been a headline, but that’s also surge pricing
They’re still going to do it and so will everyone else
I mean, what do you do in a drive through when you get to the window to pay and it’s like 3x more expensive than you expected? Just drive away? I’m sure that’s what people would argue, while completely ignoring that it’s a massive social taboo and 99% of people would just pay because of social pressure.
Also, what happens if the place starts making the food after you order, but before you pay (so you can get your food more quickly and efficiently!). Have you committed theft, or defrauded the business by deciding not to pay? I mean probably not, but I’d hate to be the first person sued to test if it holds up in court.
some localities have drive thru laws
maybe they’ll stick a camera at license plate level and bill you through collections
There’s a drive through problem, but it’s not what you’re describing. You know the price when you order and they’re not going to tell you it’s $10 when they give you your total then tell you $12 a minute later at the window.
The drive through problem is that many drive throughs aren’t set up so people can just dip out of the line if they get to the order screen and see everything is way more expensive than they expected. So you’ll have places like that where people have to wait in a line to not get food (slows down the line, and if there are enough cars in line people who do want food will go somewhere else).
Maybe work on the shit quality their food has fallen into instead of being cheeky online.
I always hated their Twitter bit. It was usually just being mean to random people online. It was never as funny as people seemed to think. There are no good ‘brands’.
