Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025

price discrimination can go much further than surge pricing! i wonder if they'll also experiment with special discounts (or exemption from the surge pricing) for people who recently ate at mcdonald's, haven't eaten recently at wendy's, are carrying cheap brands of cellphone, have not recently taken uber, live in a poor neighborhood, or shop at discount stores? and if someone eats at wendy's more than twice a week or habitually orders especially addictive items, you could raise the prices you charge them. you could even disingenuously claim that you're trying to protect your customers' health by preventing them from overeating

here in buenos aires there's apparently a law requiring restaurants to post prices for all their menu items, so in additional to the 'digital menuboards' in all the fast food restaurants, there's always a laser-printer printout in 10-point type on the wall which lists many food items that rarely or never appear on the digital menuboards, such as hamburgers without fries and drinks. so, unless that law goes away, they would have to cloak such price discrimination as discounts, maybe discounts for coming in at off-peak hours ('happy hour', as several people have referred to in this thread—though if alcohol-induced impairment of your consciousness tends to make you happy, i think something is very wrong with the way you're living the rest of your life)

for the most part, privacy is a public good rather than a private one; the benefits to privacy flow to society in general rather than the individual whose privacy is protected. price discrimination is an exception to that general rule, but biometrics make it impossible to preserve your privacy in wendy's; you can't order food there without exposing your voiceprint, your irises, and usually your face

This is not going to be well-received by their customers and is likely to send business to McDonald's and Burger King instead.

They also really shouldn't be doing "suggestive selling" whether with humans or machines. Just shut up and take the customer's order rather than trying to talk them into ordering something. Nobody likes when stores or restaurants do that even if it "increases metrics" because some people choose to buy the item being aggressively pushed. What you don't see are all of the people who go somewhere else to avoid having to deal with that.

Wendy's is:-

And of course the price minimum will be what we pay today, it will only get more expensive.

Wait until they realize that they can tie this AI into facial recognition at those big screen kiosks and they change the prices based on the appearance of the person ordering.