Wendy's Is Introducing Uber-Style 'Surge Pricing'

A fast food restaurant could adjust their pricing based not on time of day, but on which customers are looking at the board.<p>It could be based on individual unique identity (from facerec, and the umpteen ways a smartphone sells out the user), and&#x2F;or on factors they can pick up from cameras alone (like gender, ethnicity, age, style of dress, class).<p>From there, you can learn price tolerances, including how price affects repeat visits.<p>Hook it into promotions, loyalty programs, etc.<p>For extra dystopia, if there&#x27;s any demographic you&#x27;d rather not have in a particular store, you can discourage them with pricing.<p>If someone gets better pricing than you, it must be an algorithmic oddity, or they they got better promo rewards from retweeting a post, or their (upcoming) AR glasses outward-facing ads display got better impressions, or something.<p>&quot;Sir, this is a Wendy&#x27;s... halt, and submit to AI socio-biometric scanning, citizen!&quot;

It never ends. Price hikes, shrinkflation, reducing employees until there’s only a couple in the whole store, self checkout, replacing customer service with buggy chatbots, service fees, taxes, pandemic surcharges, mandatory “tips”, suggested tips (up to 30% at the kiosk yesterday!) junk fees and now surge pricing. Consumers are slowly drowning in charges and it seems like rather than correcting for gouging, the free market seems to be colluding.

Time-of-day pricing is a bit different from unpredictable dynamic pricing. If the customer can reasonably anticipate the expected pricing, that&#x27;s different from being suddenly surprised at a price hike -- like with Uber-style surge pricing, which sometimes lines up with rush hour but sometimes at completely non-obvious times.<p>Also, in terms of customer psychology it would be better to display the maximum price at lunch time (or whenever the peak is) and the lower prices as a <i>discount</i>. Fees are bad, discounts are good, even if it works out to exactly the same prices.

I get fast food infrequently enough that I&#x27;m shocked every time I look at their menus&#x27; price increases since my last visit. So nothing will change for me.

When you eat at Wendy&#x27;s and other fast food you are paying twice. The first time is for the food. The second time is when you&#x27;re getting your triple bypass at the tune of $150k.<p>I hope this surge pricing will encourage people to seek better quality food with higher nutritional value.

Personally have no problem with dynamic pricing, its how the rest of the world operates, lol.<p>But, not a fan of touch screen order kiosks. Not sanitary, and I work on tech all day the last thing I want to do is use a computer at a restaurant. But, im sure there are a bunch of people who hate interacting and probably love it. When I go to mcdonalds, I will wait extra for a person to come up to the register.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39518718">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39518718</a>

[dupe]<p>More discussion earlier over here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39514464">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39514464</a>

The more this becomes standard, the more mental fatigue we&#x27;ll all be enduring. It feels like most innovation in modern capitalism the last, say, just under 10 years, is about outsourcing more and more mental and physical effort and labor to consumers, e.g., self-checkout.

I’m surprised they don’t already have digital menu boards at all locations, they are really good at driving promotions.

next up. wendys lobbying to ban gas grills. in the name of saving the plnet of course.

Does Wendy’s even exist outside of airports?