Wendy's Is Introducing Uber-Style 'Surge Pricing' | Hacker News Reader

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

foodandwine.com

34 pointsvector_spaces33 comments

A fast food restaurant could adjust their pricing based not on time of day, but on which customers are looking at the board.

It could be based on individual unique identity (from facerec, and the umpteen ways a smartphone sells out the user), and/or on factors they can pick up from cameras alone (like gender, ethnicity, age, style of dress, class).

From there, you can learn price tolerances, including how price affects repeat visits.

Hook it into promotions, loyalty programs, etc.

For extra dystopia, if there's any demographic you'd rather not have in a particular store, you can discourage them with pricing.

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.

"Sir, this is a Wendy's... halt, and submit to AI socio-biometric scanning, citizen!"

This is going to happen. It's happening already. For example the McDonalds App (that you use to order and pay) gives custom offers to people.

They already do most of this stuff. All that in-store face recognition would do is mean they no longer need an app/loyalty scheme to do it.

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.

> the free market seems to be colluding

Markets are just machines that respond to incentives. In the absence of regulation, the only incentive of the market is profit. What you're observing is that just because a market is efficient at seeking a profit, it doesn't mean it does anything good for society at large.

There is also actual collusion, for instance, between kroger and albertsons:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/bombshell-potential-crimi...

Time-of-day pricing is a bit different from unpredictable dynamic pricing. If the customer can reasonably anticipate the expected pricing, that'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.

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 discount. Fees are bad, discounts are good, even if it works out to exactly the same prices.

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

When you eat at Wendy's and other fast food you are paying twice. The first time is for the food. The second time is when you're getting your triple bypass at the tune of $150k.

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.

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.

I also hate using kiosks. And yeah those screens are gross. But worse than that is that I have to learn their UI, and it gives them a chance to shove a set of screens between me and my food. I'm going to coin the term "sellutainment" to describe "entertaining the customer with their buying experience".

that's a pretty good word! wanting to buy a car immediately comes to mind, with manufacturers hosting web apps to configure the exact BMW that you're gonna get when you make it.

Nearly every computing system geared toward consumers has to provide some form of stimulation ("entertainment"), IMO, because the more time we spend on computers, the less human interaction we have, but our brains still need the simulated interactivity. I think it's why LLMs are so popular and will probably continue to be in the future, regardless of them ever getting "good".

> Personally have no problem with dynamic pricing

if you don't care paying for the premium then it's obviously a privilege for you.

not fun for the people on the other end of the spectrum, though.

next stop, pricing depending on how hungry you are!

>if you don't care paying for the premium then it's obviously a privilege for you.

I did not say that. I said I have no problem with dynamic pricing.

plane flights are cheaper at bad times. If everyone wants to eat at noon it potentially induces a big load on Wendys, e.g. more people staffing the counter. If you can financially motivate people to spread the load or rather "flatten the curve" it may increase efficiency.

But, not here for a flame war. For the record, yes I am stable financially, and that probably adds bias to my thoughts.

> ”But, not a fan of touch screen order kiosks.”

It’s nice to order at a counter if you know exactly what you want. But I like the kiosks if it’s a place/menu I’m not very familiar with: gives you more time to browse and decide what you want rather than gawking at an overhead menu, holding up the line, and feeling pressured into ordering the first thing that comes to mind…

> ”When I go to mcdonalds, I will wait extra for a person to come up to the register.”

Now days you can be waiting quite a while for a human to take your order at McDonald’s!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39518718

[dupe]

More discussion earlier over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39514464

The more this becomes standard, the more mental fatigue we'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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmGRGv2jEkg

People want lower prices above almost all else.

For the benefit of others who don't want to click an opaque video link:

> Ryan Tubridy grills Ryanair mogul, Michael O' Leary, on the multiple rumours, observations and comments surrounding the low fare airline and he certainly has some interesting things to say!

I'd argue not just outsourcing, but ensuring that nobody gets to benefit from past labor or collective effort. By constantly varying prices and tailoring prices to the time, location and even the individual, efforts to shop around to find the best price for a given item are defeated, or enough confusion is introduced to lead to exhaustion.

I hear what you're saying, but I have a different experience.

I prefer to order from a kiosk and to scan my own groceries. It's not like I don't like the human interaction, but when I have only a few items, or I want to be able to browse the menu a little, I like some personal space rather than feeling rushed.

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?

Yes. Might depend what country/region you're in. It's more common in some areas than others.

You traveled enough to be familiar with the food offerings of multiple airports, yet somehow lived a life inside a microcosm devoid of Wendy's restaurants. Fascinating. My guess is you live in Alaska and commute to Vermont https://locations.wendys.com/united-states

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