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Comment by magnetowasright | Hacker News Reader

I really want to know how they anticipate this will 'motivate customers to visit' or 'enhance customer and crew experience'. I know it's marketing nonsense, but really, how?

They're wanting to spend $20 million on installing plus another $10 million 'earmarked'. Not much in the grand scheme of things but someone somewhere has convinced people it'll be worth the cost.

If they could invent a fast food menu display that stays still and doesn't really break down so I can see what the menu actually is when I'm waiting to order that would be great. Oh, wait...

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'motivate customers to visit' - Some people like cheap stuff. Some amount of people who are not willing to pay x for a meal at noon might be willing to pay 0.9x at 2 pm. Other people have money and tight and inflexible schedules. Some of them may be more willing to visit at noon and pay 1.1x than they would be to visit at noon, wait in a 10 minute line, and pay x.

'enhance customer and crew experience' - Neither customers nor crew like it when the restaurant is busy enough that the line gets long. By making it more expensive to eat at peak times and less expensive to eat at off peak times, they think they can smooth out the demand schedule. Of course whether that's a net positive to any given consumer depends on their relative preferences on meal time, wait time, and meal cost. But the potential is there at least. On the crew side, a smoother demand schedule means they can either schedule fewer people on longer shifts, or if they keep schedules the same reduce the amount of "crunch time" during each shift.

Seriously who's the idiot who thought of this? It's not like they are going to give customers awesome deals based on market demand.

Floor = regular prices

Ceiling = regular prices + some percent

> I know it's marketing nonsense, but really, how?

I suppose that there is a segment of the fast-food-burger market that would choose Wendy's over a competitor if the price of food drops a slight bit during off-peak hours.

However, reversed, I have a hard time imagining that they will be able to squeeze what customer base they have even more by creating surge pricing increases during peak hours.

Maybe they'll only adopt the discount side to try to aid customer volume during off-peak hours? That seems reasonable.

There's a McDonalds near me, where if you go at 2pm on Saturdays, you are going to be waiting in the drive-thru queue for around half an hour.

I'd imagine if they put the prices up by $1 most people would not care. Of course they would lose some customers, but the overall profit for the surge period will be higher.

This optimization is commonly done in SaaS businesses - it's better to serve 10 customers at $100 a month, than 50 at $20 a month.

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