Sun- Wendy’s bold dynamic pricing move
The recent announcement by Wendy’s in the United States that it will adopt dynamic pricing during busy hours marks a significant moment in the food industry. This public declaration is unusual in a sector where price changes are often made discreetly. Wendy’s is essentially advising its customers to visit during quieter hours to save money, which could be perceived as an inconvenience. It’s akin to transforming its operations into a stock exchange, where customers are encouraged to ‘buy low and avoid buying high.’
Update: And so it begins…
I like the phrase “dynamic pricing”. Could be extended to “dynamic government spending”, “dynamic taxation”, “dynamic deficits”. Shows promise.
Yeah, watch how are the politicians and their bottom feeders going to adopt that as of now. The Media cartel will pick it up and there is going to be a massive propaganda in short order.
Other than that, the people may dynamically bypass Wendy.
I’m thinking people who eat at Wendy’s might now be saying: “I’ve got a beef.”
Where’s the thief?
I blame Putin.
Evening Wear!
SDA Bonus Points.
There is no mention in the article of whether Wendy’s customers will be informed of when peak pricing will be applied. If they are, say on an App, many will likely head to another burger chain instead.
Also, burger chains frequently offer pricing promotions on their products. How will that work when a dynamic pricing algorithm can change prices seemingly instantaneously?
Applied properly think its a decent idea to match workforce required.
Sure.
No employees in the morning.
No employees at lunch and
No employees for dinner
Will the employees get paid ‘dynamic wages’ (and receive more money) when Wendy’s is charging more for their food?
Seems only fair…
Dynamic Pricing has been a long time issue on gas here in Ottawa.
Peak pricing is anywhere from 2 to 5 cents per liter higher during morning and afternoon rush hours.
Not being a consumer of fast foods on any regular basis, I still think this is a bad idea and will fail miserably when instituted.
Imagine peak pricing in the grocery store.
Cool! Then I will employ my “dynamic buying” policy … and NEVER purchase anything at Wendy’s ever again.
Way ahead of you.
I only eat Wendy’s when I feel like waking up in the middle of the night to shit liquid for an hour.
I’ve not eaten at Taco Bell since about 2002 … when they changed their ground beef to “pink slime” … for similar reasons.
I worked at taco bell for two days in high school. It was always grade “D” boil in bag pink slime, they just took the sand out after someone posted the ingredients online and caused a ruckus. It’s smoother now, less texture.
Quite a few of the fast food pushers here in Northern Oklahoma have quit posting their prices on the wall behind the counter. They still have the choices, but no prices. Would that be legal? It really don’t matter, I guess.
Yup; when I go into a deli or bakery, and there’s no pricing posted, I just do a 180 and leave. There’s an alternative ‘pushback’; ask the clerk for the pricing on as many items as you feel like wasting your time on…
(there was a delicatessen that opened up here, tried that no-posted prices scam and folded about a year later.)
They must have come up with new ways of calculating profit and loss. The consumer will not benefit.
Think about for 10 seconds. More customers, more revenue, lower cost per item, lower prices.
Less customers, less revenue, higher cost per item, higher prices.
But you know they will increase prices when the demand is higher. So it’s not dynamic pricing as much as gouging the customer.
Meh. Wendy’s is utter crap. They can do whatever they like to drive themselves into the ground. A world without Wendy’s is like a world without islam –> better.
The burger was tolerable last time, but the french fries actually made me mad. I think there was five of them.
Still, five fries are worth more than the entire value of islam. At any time of day.
Agreed. Square hamburgers are an abomination.
Sounds like another company that has gone from a proprietorship model, where the people making the decisions were the ones who had the sales experience, to the Boeing model, where the beancounters make the big decisions and leave the engineers out of it. Then bad stuff happens and the company is in big trouble. Maybe it’s another form of “woke?”
At least other fast-food companies have just discounts—no increases—on certain days. Burger King’s Whopper Wednesdays, for example. You never pay more than the menu price, but get a discount at slower times.
I’m all set. I never do lunch anywhere during the lunch rush.
If I want a zoo, I go to the zoo, not a fast food place.
Prediction – other vendors will later adopt dynamic pricing regardless of the success/failure of Wendy’s roll-out, and despite any public backlash.
This will happen one company at a time to appear as though each company is acting independently. When it happens, the public will be led to blame it on “woke” corporations or some other such spin.
But like usual, this has already been determined to be forced on the public with the puppet heads of each corporation given their marching orders and the controlled media to spin accordingly.
pffft.
l have it on good authority higher ups at Wendy’s got ahold of a highly classified document laying out a timeline for the implementation of hyperinflation whereby the price increase can actually be seen happening over the course of the day.
a papa burger going for 3,000,000,000 for lunch costs 3,020,000,000 for supper.
the cost savings in signage alone . . . ./sarc off
Papa Burgers are at A&W, not Wendy’s!
yes. but my favourite is still the teen burger , 50 years past being a teen , based on my high school AW habit. need that bacon and root beer
got me there.
by a curious quirk by the way my brain works l recognize the diff burgers not by name but l associate it with a geographic location.
which just happens to coincide with a burger outlet. ha ha!!
I know just what they’re going to do. You walk into an empty restaurant and see a price of, say, 10 bucks for a burger combo. As soon as you order it, “demand has gone up” – so now it’s 12 bucks. While you’re fumbling for your debit card, someone comes in behind you and orders at a kiosk – “store traffic is peaking” – 14 bucks. Just as you go to tap your debit card, you see the amount on the card reader flicker up to $16 as a terminal at the counter chimes with a Doordash or UberEats order.
Here’s what’s coming. The DEI crowd would really like to individualize pricing. Maybe charge white people more and black people less. Once they make prices and purchasing only available on your mobile device, they’ll have the freedom to do it.
Are they saying that off-hours pricing will be lowered, or that peak pricing will be increased?
That depends. What time do you usually go there?
Reddit has a good sub on this already.
Many people talking about dynamic buying.
A lot of the cost of labor is being offset to the consumer, who is now doing lions share of the work, ordering via kiosk etc, In order to save money and push the profit further, they will go completely automated, with the odd person around to clear the jam in the bun feeder or something (can’t completely eliminate humans from the process). There goes all the work for the millions of immigrants that can’t speak the national language(s) they are brining in. Also loss of “first jobs” for many young people, or retirees..
Hopefully the silver lining might be resurge in popularity if the small mom and pop restos, diners, etc. Some have said that 5 guys used to be expensive but now is the same as other fast food chains, but quality is much better..
As a teen, I used to work at Burger King and Wendy’s, Burger King was owned by Pillsbury at that time and wasn’t too bad, Wendy’s used to have the best ingredients of all the major fast food chains, fresh burger every day, high quality in the breads and other components, but not any more.
Dynamic pricing is a consequence of rising input costs, particularly big hikes in minimum wages which we have seen in most jurisdictions. Yet average Joe citizen cannot seem to make the connection between higher wage mandates and higher consumer goods prices. He prefers to entertain conspiracies about “animal spirits” or “market failure” or “collusion”.
Personally, I see this a very innovative and positive move for Wendy’s (which will be short lived if it works). Their competition will copy it if that’s the case and take away the benefits.
1. Mid-afternoon food sits and workers have little to do. The result is sub par offerings and paying employees for nothing.
2. Fast food has been (or should be) about convenience. Most people (who aren’t a little deranged) don’t have Wendy’s as their ultimate destination. They pass one in their travels and decide to pull in.
3. There are many, many, many people who work during the day with flexible schedules that allow them to stop off and grab lunch at varying times dependent upon their work schedule. Tailoring it to save money isn’t difficult for a lot of them.
4. Moving product results in fresher food offerings….freshly made. So, pull into the McDonalds with one car in the lot…or pull into Wendy’s with six cars in the lot and two in the drive-thru. You know the fries will be just made.
5. People are lemmings. They do what their peers do. So, if at the end of the year Wendy’s can say…hey, look, per capita, we’re a more popular restaurant than McDonalds or Burger King…or we increased our market share by __% this year….the lemmings notice a trend and hop on board. Humans are ridiculous…but, that’s how a lot of them think.
6. Offering lower prices at off hours will almost guarantee someone choosing Wendy’s over the other offerings at that time frame. It’s not like there is a whole lot of difference between them. And, it’s a weird industry where most times the competitors are in a rather small area that allows choice.
So yeah, I think someone came up with a good idea….but like I said…if it works it will be short lived because the other fast food joints will do exactly the same thing with additional benefits to counter it.
Orsen; a HUGE portion of the lunch rush is/are people with a specific lunch break, especially in downtown commercial areas. The other big component is construction and utilities workers; in the case of construction the job site pretty much empties out from 12:00PM till 1:00. The married guys bring lunches and the young single guys buy their lunches.
Same for early morning rush; the young guys grab a breakfast sandwich of some sort and a coffee to go.
I think it’s a great idea. It seems odd to me that some ok e would think this is a bad idea. You go to a restaurant at 2pm, it’s dead. The waitress gives you stink eye because now she has to do something besides scroll TikTok until the dinner hour. Why not have a steady stream.
Lunch and dinner hour are always going to be busier. Now maybe a few marginal people will fast a few hours. Less frazzled staff.
As an owner I would take a steady stream over 2 panicked hours and having to pay people all day.
Trips to Cancun cost more on Christmas vacation than during hurricane season too.
When i worked at Burger King as a Teen in the early 1980’s my wage was less than $2 an hour, my first ‘raise’ was a nickel, I kid you not.
Before the advent of computerized everything, the managers tasks were to allocate labour via a GANT type chart showing each worker and their shifts vs days of the week and hours of the day.
yes, sometimes they put me on night close during the middle of a school week, but I could dispute that, as a student. The monitoring of peak times of the day and the week was something the managers did, so less busy, less labor. When it was ‘Slack’ there was always something to do (“if there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean”) restock, take out the garbage, prep things for next rush or shift, etc.
As far as food went, we had a “DEFCON” type system in place, where the numbers on the indicator in the kitchen represented our readiness status, higher the number the more stock we had prepared . X number of burgers on the heat rack, x number of burgers and buns in the steamer, ready to be made (burger king hallmark was “have it your way” so most burgers were made to order and not just on the heat rack). there was a chime associated with a change in “DEFCON” status so when it rang we could escalate or de escalate. If the drive thru or dining room would fill up, or a bus would pull up, we’d increase the level of prepared food, drop more fry baskets etc.
it was all a system. Established patterns over the years meant we knew when it was going to be busy, breakfast, lunch and dinner, summer vs winter, tourist seasons, weekends, after bar closing times, etc.
We had to keep all products that went timed out and the managers would count and account for all the food waste. It was pretty tightly regulated to limit losses. If i remember correctly, the cost of a whopper back then was $0.20, $0.25 with cheese.
It was a good job for young people, very dynamic and fast paced and you learned a good work ethic, business sense, etc. I have many stories of the crazy goings on there, both from the public side and “behind the scenes.”
EDIT: seems like Wendy’s is ‘clarifying’ its earlier statement..
https://torontosun.com/news/wendys-denies-any-attempt-at-surge-pricing-with-its-new-menu-boards
Our fast food is in our freezer: venison, hare, and grouse. It was dynamically priced, too.
If you bagged it, it’s really “not fast enough” food.
Now there’s a point! 🙂
I believe Peter Mansbridge hasn’t eaten at Wendy’s in years…
Too funny.
So does this apply to only to corporate stores, or is it expected to happen at franchises as well?
Is this substantially different from “Early Bird Specials” which have existed for decades.
As a shopping mavin, sounds good, I’ll play!
Thanks Wendy’s.
I think they should charge based on how you’re dressed, what kind of shoes you have on and what you drove up in.
So, what you’re saying is a break for tesla drivers wearing hemp sandals, right?
Hmmmm…paying more at peak hours. Where have I heard that before?
If I were a service-person (repairing fridges, freezers, cash registers, etc), I would consider ‘dynamic pricing’ rates to charge, as I would be willing to charge extra for hauling my tools across busy parking lots (danger pay), and maybe laying on a greasy floor in the kitchen with staff stepping over me.
If they wanted me to do repairs after – say 6pm – well then, night rates.
As a service tech on consumer and business communication products I kept telling the manager to start charging more if the customer tried to fix it first.
Prediction: MASSIVE PR fiasco which will be soon reversed.
I “get” the economic argument though
Mayne Wendy’s is preparing us for what is to come
It’s a sneaky way of saying price increase.
the best chance to vote with your feet ever. i for one dont like their boiled burgers . Insipid colour.
Why couldn’t they have just stuck a picture of some “brave” tranny on their burger wrapper?
That would have lessened the lunch and suppertime rushes.
I don’t have a problem with this.
Many businesses offer discounts during slower times, that’s why there’s so many sales in Januarys.
Even restaurants do the same thing – a lunch menu would have the same items as a dinner menu, but be a couple of bucks cheaper.
I wonder how long it will be until this happens in real life?
Falling Down [1993] Hamburger Scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJs9p-VNORw