alt-text: Woman ordering food (photo): “I would like to buy a hamburger for the same price that it was 2 hours ago.”
Cashier (sketched): “Sir, this is a Wendy’s”
As long they don’t keep the “lowest price” the regular base price, this does have the potential to disrupt fast food purchasing habits. Imagine people always trying to game Wendys to see if they can get the burger cheaper, you’d theoretically see a sine wave develop over a month or so. Then that sine wave would translate laterally as time further progressed and people adapted to the shifting surge pricing. It also has just as much likelihood to ruin Wendy’s sales, but time will tell.
The fluxuations will be dampened by the fact people get hungry around 12 and 5. When people are able to buy food (lunch breaks and end of work day) will also limit such fluctuations. Maybe a sine wave will form but there probably isn’t enough people with the ability or forsight to try and game the system.
Time constraints or not I think most people will just go next door to Burger King.
Also, if they start to sell cheaper that what use to be the regular price in off-peak hours, it could attract some people.
As long as they are transparent about which hour you’ll find which price, that’s not so much a problem for the customer. But transparency is important, I don’t want to see the illegitimate son of Wendy’s and SNCF pricing algorithm. Never.
There’s an altruistic future I could envision where this software goes towards selling burgers for cheap to lower-income people coming in at odd times, in order to avoid food waste where the burgers get thrown out. Similarly, nice restaurant owners do this the simple way: Low prices for good food, always. But, I definitely don’t trust chains like Wendy’s with this.
I feel like people are getting a little too up in arms for something that hasn’t even happened yet. If it ends up happening, so be it. Let the market decide. There are many of us who will just stop eating at Wendy’s but let’s face it, the general population will not.
I feel like this is one of those memes that in the future historians and sociologists will use to gleam context and the human element to major life periods after the collapse of society as qe know it.
Shit I mean lul
Watch me predict the future: There will be sites/apps that monitor prices so you can order at the least expensive times.
The restaurant chains will sue those sites/apps.
That’s gonna be the dumbest lawsuit, which means it’s very likely to come to pass
Kinda reminds me of the GasBuddy app that informs customers of varying gas prices in their area, and of course GasBuddy realized how much power they were weilding with this app, and has sold its soul to the devil and now incorporates customer psychological manipulation & data mining into the app.
Yup. Have to change a setting to see stations that don’t have a GasBuddy deal. Such as Costco, which Always has much cheaper prices where I live than anything else.
The only way I’ve been able to find Costco gas prices is to go to the Costco website then search each location separately, quite a time-consuming headache, but I spent a couple hours doing that one day a couple summers ago to figure out which Costcos in California have diesel.
Yeah… I was an early adopter of GasBuddy and kept my locals up to date. Made more people use it and it was great for a bit. Then enshittificaiton happened… Big corps pull a bait and switch. Small companies sell out…
If your mom did surge pricing she could buy the whole Wendy’s franchise.
But she wouldn’t because professionals have standards
Would that work, though? There are guys who want to be the only one at the time, and there are guys who want to be one of many at a time.
Splooge pricing
I actually like Wendy’s, but if they implement this at my local store I’m boycotting. The cost for you to make the food per item doesn’t fucking change if there’s 1 person in line or 100, just the wait time. It’s pure profiteering.
I like Wendy’s also and this really fucking torques my tacos. Well, fuck them. I’m not going to be ripped off because I choose to eat at a popular time of day.
Their employees thank you. They don’t wanna make your rush hour burgers.
The effort the employee has to put forth to meet demand changes during a rush, not that they will see a penny of the higher revenue they are directly responsible for generating.
But are they paying the employee more?
Hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha haha!
It changes in that there are economies of scale involved. It actually becomes cheaper and more efficient for the company to make 20 cheeseburgers at once than just one. That’s why this surge pricing thing is a joke. Would the company really like to introduce friction to customers buying more food?
I’ll just demand everything be made to order and be fresh. I encourage everyone to do the same and tank their numbers. If they’re going to charge extra during peak hours then you bet your ass I’m demanding fries fresh out of the frier and burgers right off the grill. I can wait 3 minutes for the fries.
That’s how you end up with spit in your burger.
And a lawsuit. What’s your point?
That’s how you end up with spit in your burger.
^ This.
Forget to switch accounts there bud? I know where the two downvotes came from. Another troll to block.
Only way I can make any sense of it is to try balance the day. Get more business on quiet time, and less on rush hour. But I don’t get how it would make any sense from the business perspective since usually you’d want to optimize for the rush hour, not push customers away with higher pricing
Because people just show up at rush hour for shits and giggles, and not because that’s their non-negotiable lunch break or their trip home. This is a stupid move.
What happens? They change the prices throughout the day?
They announced they will be switching to surge pricing. If there are a lot of people trying to get burgers, they’ll increase the price of burgers.
Let’s put “surge pricing” in quotes to make it clear that it’s some bullshit they just made up.
Back in my day we called it price gauging. Not sure what this surge price bullshit is. They are trying to steal my nostalgic feeling for surge to make it ok?
Ah, Surge…
Wasn’t surge basically the diesel version of mountain dew? I vaguely remember trying it once and not caring for it.
Fucking LOL. When are we going to start rioting against all this bullshit?
Rioting won’t work, you talk with your money. The only thing capitalism cares about is your labor and consumption…that’s it.
My money said “string them up from the streetlamps” so I guess we doing that.
Narrator: they didn’t
But will the employees see surge pay for handling so many customers at once?
LOL!
No, but the floggings will increase.
I mean, I don’t think the entire concept is flawed. I want to wait and see what it actually means - especially if it’s cheaper to grab food outside of surge hours.
I understand it likely won’t be, but I won’t damn them until we have more information.
especially if it’s cheaper to grab food outside of surge hours.
you really don’t understand how corporations work, do you.
It’s not impossible.
It’s not probable, but why not wait to damn them?
I say why wait
Even if it started out that way, where “surge” pricing is current pricing and “off-surge” pricing is cheaper, leading to consumers paying less overall, it won’t stay that way. It would only be that way to prime consumers mentally to accept that dynamic pricing. After which they’ll slowly increase prices, 10 cents or whatever every month. Soon enough it’ll cost more and the corporation can brag about how it increased profits again this quarter. Remember publicly traded companies are legally obligated to maximize profit - the only time they aren’t doing so is when they’re burning money to prime consumers to accept bullshit or building a captive base, in order to eventually maximize profits.
Because in the last 5,000 price hikes there has never been a decrease in pricing. There’s a bit of a trend. Corps are always guilty until proven innocent. Hint: they’re never innocent.
Steps to creating your own “Bullish Burger” Stock Market
- Bulk order just before peak,
- Resell those orders as demand rises.
- Profit
that might not be entierly legal,
you cant legally sell onions on the futures market since 1958Huh, son of a bitch. Can’t wait to use this one
The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as “motion picture box office receipts”
Lol. Wut?
From a couple minutes on Wikipedia, it was added to the law as part of Dodd-Frank in 2010, which overhauled the US financial system after the recession. The MPAA lobbied heavily on it
in 1956 some guy sneakily trough shell companys and such stuff, used the futures market to controll 98% of the onion suply and screwed over a lot of people.
the onion futures act was the goverments absolute brilliant idea for a fix.
i have no idea what the box office receipts thing is about
Yeah no, I get the Onion thing, it’s usually taught in collegiate finance courses… but the Box Office thing threw me off. Apparently the MPAA lobbied to have it added. I am just amused that it’s attached to Onion Law.
What’s the name of the guy who do this comic? I had it blocked on reddit, how can I block him here?
it looks like OP/[whoever made the template] removed the artist’s name, but it is SrGrafo. I doubt that the artist would be on lemmy though, considering it’s still quite a small platform.
Srgrafo is chill. I wonder why this guy dislikes him.
They probably just aren’t interested in seeing the comics, rather than disliking the artist personally
Fair enough
We are probably better off not knowing.
So what happens if the price changes while you’re waiting in line? Will they post the prices to the last car in line or do you have to wait till you get up to order. What about drive throughs that don’t have enough space for someone to get out of line? Are they gonna try to guilt people into paying whatever price they’re given?
Yes they will guilt you. The McDonald’s in my town has it so you can’t get out of line once you reach the signs with the prices. If you don’t have it memorized and realize you can’t afford it… well sucks to be you
So what happens if the price changes while you’re waiting in line?
They probably want you to preorder. Not saying you should do it
Why do people genuinely care about this? You couldn’t pay me to eat at wendy’s, I don’t care how they price their products.
Wherever you do like to eat might adopt this one day.
You must see how one fast food chain implementing anti-consumer practices can affect an industry at large, right?
It’s a sign of the times. We are fighting change. Humans like having expectations met and standards upheld so we can predict our reality.
the cashier can’t change the price, why would you ask them?
If you still frequent an establishment that does this, you’re the problem
I’m looking at you Apple fanboys!
Apple doesn’t do surge pricing on anything, the fuck are you on about?
If you frequent than establishment with all the bullshit it pulls, you’re the problem.
The fuck kinda cherry picking stupid you gotta be to miss that?
it feels like you didn’t even respond to my comment
Do you know what sucks about there being SOOOOOO many people? It’s that there’s always a certain percentage that are morons and they still go for shit like this, ruining it for everyone else.
It’s an interesting spin on the tragedy of the commons. There’s no public or shared resources here, but the few are still ruining it for the many.
The tragedy of the commons is all capitalist nonsense from the 60s anyway. People are quite good at balancing resources within their communities, and sharing spaces and resources makes everyone’s experiences better. It’s only with the “profit at others expense” capitalist mindset that the cooperative model falls apart.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth
The few will always ruin it for the many where capitalism is involved. It’s inevitable.
But it’s not the few you think it is. It’s not normal people just trying to get by, it’s the people who set it up this way in the first place. They know not everyone will stop. It’s squarely on them.
Bingo!
Like, is this a self-imposed excise tax? Too many people in line! Let’s knock the poors out since our food is unhealthy. (I know that I am conflating an excise tax with capitalist class aggression, but I’m tired, so whatever.)
Not a tax, basically just a price-signal. But maybe also a markeing push since it gets attention by being novel. Its functionally similar to happy hour specials or loss-leaders.
