The internet lost its shit over Wendy's 'surge pricing' | Hacker News Reader

The internet lost its shit over Wendy's 'surge pricing'

michaelestrin.substack.com

12 pointssitch_norm20 comments

What if I get offered cheaper food during slow periods?

Let’s be honest, $12 for a chicken sandwich meal is too expensive. Wendy's wants to sell more food so they want to find the price that makes you think “I’d rather just go grab a BOGO Dave’s Single and Chicken Sandwich for $8 than run to the grocery store”.

People don’t realize they’re already being dynamically priced with coupons and sales and loyalty programs and by location. I don’t understand the outrage.

As long as they don’t price gouge, dynamic pricing is actually the norm. Probably the most notable thing about the statement is AI menu recommendations. It’s odd that people are more weirded out about dynamic pricing than about an AI studying their eating habits.

the current prices would most likely be a baseline, they can't go below $12. During dinner you might pay 20, 2pm in the afternoon maybe 14.... etc..

Do you have inside info?

Today I pay less than the sticker price every time I use one of the offers from these places (hint the offers are always available). I can’t remember the last time I bought a full priced menu item.

And look at McDonalds, you pay an extra $1-2 per menu item when ordering deliver vs pickup. Dynamic pricing.

Is it cheaper when less people are ordering delivery? More expensive when the weather's bad?

I think you're just describing a surcharge.

"What if I get offered cheaper food during slow periods?"

Ask me after that has ever happened a single time in the history of humans.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but aren't happy hour discounts are just that? Discounted food and beverage during slower hours.

As i understand it, stuff is overpriced, and happy hour "discounts" are the actual normal prices.

But stuff spends more time at the regular price and less time at happy hour prices, making the higher price normal and the quotes around discounts the lie.

I'm guessing dynamic pricing wouldn't give more money to the employees who have to work harder during busy periods. They're the limited resource not the food.

It’s a terrible idea. It’s not like they ever realistically run out of food so pricing it as a scarcity is ridiculous.

Bars seldom run out of beer (maybe in the land down under) but they still have happy hours.

That should point out that words matter and how they will be perceived matter. I don’t buy the narrative that Wendy’s wasn’t going to jack up prices during busy time. Happy hour is used to bring business in and make it busy. But at the end of the day, the CEO was an idiot for not realizing how this would be perceived even if the plan was to lower prices to drive in more business during slow times. People are right to associate surge prices with things like Uber

Happy Meal Hour?

They never run out of food because they keep their prices high enough that people don’t buy all the food they have. Even wendy’s food is subject to scarcity

which they'll continue to do without needing to price gouge at different times of day. If they want to save or make more money they should focus more on total autonomy via ai and robotics.

Go to McDonalds right now. You can get 10 nuggets for $5.39 or BOG$1 6 piece, so 12 nuggets, for $4.49. The 20 piece is $6.79. So that’s $0.53, $0.37, and $0.34 per/ct respectively. In the first case it’s not even a volume thing, you just get nuggets cheaper because of the dynamic pricing.

If you think everyone pays the same price for consumer goods you’ve been mislead.

Isn’t a happy hour a well established thing already? Just don’t call it surge pricing

I also thought the same originally but isn't Happy Hour just discounting during slower hours? Surge pricing would be raising the prices during busy hours. Bars still keep the prices the same at those time. At the end of the day, it's semantics, though.

it's more than semantics though. We humans are emotional creatures, it feels good to get a discount for X and we feel cheated if we get a surcharge for -X. That's what's at root of the Wendy's story, and should be a lesson on PR and corporate communications. Extremists are going to boycott Wendy's for the rest of their lives based on this, and I don't blame them. Even if that doesn't meaningfully affect their bottom line, people are still going to be all "ugh, fuck Wendy's." If they'd avoided all usage of the word surge, and just said they were spending $20 million to modernize their restaurants so they were nicer, we'd instead wouldn't even be talking about this and those that would be would just be debating how and if they could make Wendy's nicer instead of this.

Textbook victim blaming. A+

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