I hope their AI chatbot offers burgers for negative dollars during periods of low demand.
Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#52I don't think Wendy's is good enough to warrant paying extra for. If their prices increase I would rather just eat somewhere else.
One of my favorite alternative restaurants is Red Bowl.
They are a regional chain that offers a sit-down meal with service for about the same price as fast food nowadays. And it is far better from a health perspective.
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#53This has been described as similar to Uber/Lyft surging but it’s different in a few critical ways that I suspect consumers are less tolerant of. When Uber/Lyft are surging it incentivise more drivers to go to the surge area. This raises supply and the surge rate decreases. Drivers are distributed automatically where they are needed. Overall trips taken should be higher compared with a no surging model. So it shifts b…
>Fundamentally they are betting that their food demand is inelastic enough that they’ll make more money overall. That just feels more exploitative and is going to be harder to market. To be fair I think it's less exploitive than Ubers prices surging during a terror attack..
This is a wild proposition.
Were taxis running directly after 9/11?
This is sort of a problem if a society depends on them as a piece of critical infrastructure. If a city owns a bus route and needs to evacuate a population, they can just do it by edict.
No one is considering this edge case and how it should be handled at Uber. A company or community that has pride in what they offer would probably provide rides for free during such an anomaly. This is a drawback on the scalability of technology as we currently implement it.
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#54This has been described as similar to Uber/Lyft surging but it’s different in a few critical ways that I suspect consumers are less tolerant of. When Uber/Lyft are surging it incentivise more drivers to go to the surge area. This raises supply and the surge rate decreases. Drivers are distributed automatically where they are needed. Overall trips taken should be higher compared with a no surging model. So it shifts b…
When Uber/Lyft are surging it incentivise more drivers to go to the surge area.
Or.. it incentivizes drivers to create surge conditions so they can make more money.
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-artificially-tr...
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#55This 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 choo…
Might attract people who want to go there in off hours when the food is cheap and could be marketed that way. It’s interesting because they could definitely change the pricing algorithm dynamically as they see changes in customer behavior and impacts on revenue.
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#56It seems insane to me to market this as "the food costs extra at certain times of day" rather than "Happy Hour-- 20% off!"
It costs 25% extra for 23 hours - et voilà, Happy Hour!
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#57I hope their AI chatbot offers burgers for negative dollars during periods of low demand.
They’ll probably just put a disclaimer underneath in tiny font.
Eventually all ads will be like ads for drugs where you have a 1 minute ad and then 3 minutes of a grandparent playing with their grandkid while someone speed reads the fine print at you.
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#58It’s not a new idea but i’ve always “wanted” to do something similar with beer at a long bar with many many kegs of craft beer. Idea is to make sure all the product ends up moving and nothing stays untouched. Massive train station style flipping letter/number signage behind the bar with updating prices every 15-30min or something if it’s busy. One of the laundry list of reasons this is just a pipe dream is alcohol pr…
Big Board DC does this, minus the train station ticker:
https://wamu.org/story/11/11/04/inside_the_beer_and_burger_s... http://thebigboarddc.com
I could have sworn I've been to a place that does the letter flipping, but I might be misremembering. And yeah, lots of places where that wouldn't be legal.
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#59During surge periods restaurants redirect customers all the time. "We're sorry, there's a 15 minute delay for hamburgers; are you OK waiting or would you prefer to order something else". Also: "Happy hour pricing". As long as they have a somewhat reasonable fixed maximum price I suspect consumers will accept this quite well. Then it wouldn't be much different than dynamic happy hour pricing or any of the many other t…
Your two redirect scenarios isn't surge pricing though, and I think run counter to the very nature of surge pricing.
In the first scenario the restaurant is reducing stress on the kitchen and the client by offering an alternative with a good reason. If the restaurant instead said "you can pay an extra $2 or wait 15 minutes", then it's comparable but I haven't run into that yet.
In the Happy Hour scenario the restaurant offers specific discounts to increase sales volume
Re: Wendy's will experiment with dynamic surge pricing for food in 2025
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's a single restaurant on the planet with a line that runs with the same labour cost at 11 PM as they do at 6 PM.
You're missing the point. It's normalized against sales volume. So it doesn't matter if the late night restaurant is quarter-staffed, if they only do a tenth of the sales volume.
No, I got your point, I'm saying that partial mitigations for that are already in place. Every business on the planet also assumes there will be slow times and busy times, and the busy times will make up for the slow.
Surge pricing only really works when the demand and supply can be elastic, and a Wendy's restaurant is a bad example.