I can't imagine a customer who doesn't read about this and goes in and sees their normal meal more expensive because it's lunch time, will be switching where they get lunch
I would probably willingly pay 25% more, and unwillingly pay 40% more, if it kept me from going to somewhere with worse quality in the categories I choose.
It would be a clever idea to have a ceiling price no higher than the current price, but offer lower prices at certain times of day. This is well understood in hospitality and why we have early bird specials, happy hours, etc.
Wendy's seem to have decided that the current price is to be be a floor, not a ceiling.
Cue acres of bad publicity.
Beginning as early as 2025, I will begin testing a variety of enhanced features during my moments of culinary weakness like Arby's, McDonald's, Taco Bell, and suggest pizza and restaurants based on factors such as time of day and present company.
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...
'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.
Floor = regular prices
Ceiling = regular prices + some percent
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.
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.
