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There was some discussion on Marketplace on NPR saying they might just end up reducing prices during slow times to attract more people but if that's their plan then their communication of this has been disastrous. If they actually raise prices during peaks then they're fucking greedy douchebags and fuck them all.
It's the same statement, just with different price points.
In fact, the idea is nothing new- bar and grill restaurants have had this for decades. They call it "happy hour" prices. The only new part is a fast food place trying it, with a different time frame for happy hour.
Reminds me of the story about World of Warcraft cutting your experience gain in half after a certain amount of continuous playtime.
Players hated it, so the devs decided instead that your experience gain would be doubled for a time as a logoff bonus.
Players loved it. Of course, they were still getting exactly the same exp.
this is pure greed. there won't be any lower prices.
if they were just after more traffic and lower prices were on the table as a way achieve that goal, they would have have said they were going to 'experiment' with 'new promotions' -- not 'dynamic pricing', a term which already is seen by most as being a bad thing
The company has actually released a statement saying that lowering prices during slow hours is exactly what they're planning on doing, along with promoting certain items based on weather (which I assume means ice cream when it's hot, coffee when it's cold, etc).
they're lying.
"it's slow. labor is too high"
"we've sent home everyone we can, boss"
"i know, let's lower prices on a #1 and #2 for a couple hours and stick a banner in the app"
crickets for 3 more hours, until dinner rush starts
yea. that won't work. the only way they're "lowering" prices during slow periods is if they jack up the menu across-the-board (ya know, even more than they have the last four years) first.
I mean, contrasting "raising" and "lowering" the price isn't all that meaningful when you consider that they set the baseline price arbitrarily.
considers
It makes financial sense if you disregard the complexity to consumers of having the prices be all over.
Basically, during peak hours, if there isn't enough capacity at a given location to serve customers, then ordinarily some will give up in despair at the line length and go from prime locations to less-prime locations. It's kinda random who gets to eat there.
This would mean that the people who are willing to pay a premium get the meal at the prime location, and those that don't go to a fallback, less-desirable location. That's economically efficient.
It'd also encourage businesses to offer flex time on when people take lunch. That'd make more-efficient use of an existing fast food location, spread load over time rather then having a huge surge.
The thing is, I'm not sure that customers want to budget for lunch based on when they show up. Like, dynamic pricing adds complexity to their life.
EDIT: If dynamic pricing does catch on with restaurants, then it'd make sense for users to have an app to help route them to the not-under-load restaurants. I don't think that this should be a Wendy's app, because all restaurants that might do dynamic pricing would just be reinventing the wheel. Would rather have some standard API for exposing menu, wait time, and pricing data to third-party apps.
EDIT2: One reason it might not work: This sort of thing makes sense for airlines, because people buy reservations, are guaranteed to be served when they choose and have pricing data. Ditto for something like Uber. Customers can compare prices electronically, take into account price information, make their purchase, are guaranteed to get what they want. But I'm not going to get a reservation at Wendy's, not unless they change their business model a lot more drastically than just adding dynamic pricing. I am still gonna wait in line if a lot of people show up anyway, who may not be paying attention to the pricing.
I know that some businesses added pickup parking slots during COVID and online purchasing. A better way to do this might be to just have dynamic pricing on online orders, and serve those first, have people just park in the "online pickup" parking slots and have their meal taken out to them. That way, they're basically paying extra to be served more-quickly.
EDIT3: Another way to improve efficiency might be to try to increase utilization of dine-in capacity. I sometimes spend time during the day at a Carl's Jr, and virtually nobody dines in there -- it's all drive-through. The franchisee is paying for the drive-in facilities but getting no good out of it. My understanding is that normally, fast food places serve drive-through customers before dine-in. But if you look at Starbucks, they always have people sitting there banging away on their laptops. It might be interesting to try to pull people like that in -- offer both fast food and more-elaborate dine-in-only food at a premium, have charging outlets, find a better way to make money from the dine-in facilities.
Restaurants already offer happy hour and off day incentives. That's nothing new. The problem here is the attitude. Raising prices will decrease demand, but they know they have excess demand, so they're making up for that by increasing the prices to eat up that excess demand. Restaurants used to deal with that by hiring more employees to increase supply to meet the unmet demand. There is obviously a complete lack of desire to do that. You can walk into any chain restaurant these fays and you're likely to see a wait for a table, even though the restaurant is less than half full. It's not that they can't meet the demand. They've decided it's more profitable and easier to eat up the excess demand by increasing the prices instead of increasing the supply.
They could just as well "shrinkflate" that way. Prices stay the same at peak hours (against inflation, meaning they're still going up) while off-peak hours get a "discount" (prices stay roughly the same).