Flux pricing

Do the employees make more money during these times?

You know they won't lol
What are you? Some kind of socialist pig?
The CEO needs another 100k watch!
I can't imagine why they would
We'll just call more of them up at the last minute. Get here in 20 minutes or you'll be on 3rd shift.

Fast food restaurants have lost the plot and violated their balance of fast/cheap/Meh. Now it’s fastish/over priced/meh and below

There’s a McDonald’s near me. I’ll never spend less than $20 there on a full meal, or I leave hungry. Unless I get just an Al a carte McGriddle or something.

There’s a cash only breakfast place across the street. A huge chicken friend steak with gravy and potatoes, corn, hash browns, pancakes… mmm…. $10.

There’s a McDonald’s near me. I’ll never spend less than $20 there on a full meal
Which means you should never spend more than $0 there. They'll just keep raising the prices for as long as you'll pay them.
- Bingo.
Sounds like some damn good reasons to go to the locally-owned restaurant and try to ensure that they get to stay in business. It always sucks when the mom-and-pop/family-owned local places go out of business because people just go to the chains all the time.
- They’re always poppin
I feel like Jimmy johns and chick fil a are the only truly fast restaurants anymore. For JJ you do have to go inside, but they often make your sandwich and complete payment in less than a minute, maybe 5 minutes max.
Meanwhile I've been to other drive throughs where even with very few people in line, it somehow takes 10/15 mins to get your meal. Plus, it's often incorrectly made and expensive
- Chick fil a is homophobic; that might be keeping demand lower than it would be otherwise.
It was due to the Celebrity Chef "everyone has to be a professional chef" era that we're coming out of. People didn't want to change their eating habits, but they wanted to feel fancy like rich British food man on TV, so they started demanding gourmet experiences from restaurants that had no business attempting to offer gourmet experiences. Everybody fancied themselves a foodie without actually trying to go out to nice places.
- But places still serve the same crap from what I've seen. Is it just the prices that are "gourmet"?
- Nobody is demanding a fancy meal from McDonald's.
  The fast food industry went all in on a bet about 20-30 years ago, and now they're starting to cash in.
  They wanted to get people dependant on eating their crap every single day. They view not just each other as competition, but the concept of you cooking for yourself as direct competition for their crap. They want you sitting in their drive through 3 meals a day. They don't want you to even consider using your own kitchen.
  Their food is designed to trigger an addictive response. The food is cheap too produce, and really not very appealing to even look at. And yet, drive by any random McDonald's at 1030 am and it will be 4 cars deep in the drive through.
  Now that an entire generation and their kids are hooked, they can raise the prices until people can just barely afford it.
- All about the moola

So, you're a restaurant and when people come for restauranting at restauranting times, you charge them more, because people should actually come restauranting outside restauranting times.

That is, er, innovative.

I don't know how it is in the US, but people will typically go for lunch at lunch times where I live and if a fast food restaurant starts considering this kind of shit, it will promptly go out of business.

Corporations aren't trustworthy enough to handle all the data they've been given with modern computing. Of course they're going to pick it apart and try to figure out a way to profit off it, customer service, ethics, and common sense be damned!
Unless they change the metrics by which they price their menu items. If the price is lowered, and surge pricing makes a 12 noon burger $0.50 more than usual, but an off-peak burger costs less than the OG price (but enough to still turn a profit), then Wendy's might actually see more money if they can undercut other FF joints.

I can't wait until they use this and "market pricing" to justify charging minority demographics in urban centers more for higher-traffic peak hours or simply extend the peak hours wider in these zones to exploit these communities more aggressively.

You know they will, because they'll be able to, and the current "justice" system doesn't know what just action looks like if it marched in to Congress and stole the podium.
- We already allow housing, transportation, groceries, and I'm sure tons else to be effectively price-redlined, so I'm disappointed but not surprised to see more of it encroaching.

For those of us outside the US/North America, what is this flux price Wendy's thing?

Basically, price surges on the menu when in high demand. So if you would go take out some Wendy's during some holiday or a very busy time the prices would be higher than usual.
Obviously, I agree with others that Wendy's will probably do that sneakily and not with huge price difference but the concept is disgusting especially when it comes to food imo.
- Oh wow, that's really bad wtf. I would not mind it if it meant that the employees also get paid that much extra. But by looking at another comment here, it looks to me as if that is not the case. Really sad how undeserving of our support this system is, especially in the USA.

Now they can legally advertise one price, and then charge you a completely different one! They're probably hoping you won't even notice you got ripped off.

Theyre backtracking now. "thats not what we said"- wendy's ceo. Too late bro.

Yeah exactly. This is captialism 101: have absolutely no morals and want to maximize shareholder profits? Are you SICK of negative PR impacting your bottom line? Try 'leaking' today! Leaking let's you test out your controversial decisions with minimal risk! Simply gaslight consumers if they react to it! Try leaking today!

They are probably going to start small, at most a dollar so people don't really notice at first.

Some places seem to do this through a shitty app, that only gives discounts at unpopular times.

Of course it only does this like twice, so you never get any good deals once you've used it a few times. RIP Double Bacon XL for like £2. No way am I paying normal Burger King prices. There's a fucking Greggs next door you chimps!

Americans when surge pricing:

Americans when all the burgers are 30% off all year except at lunch and dinner (it's happy hour now): 😀

Then you raise prices every month until it's back. :D

I stopped doing fast food a long time ago. My burgers are way better now. Its just not worth it if you have a kitchen

The point of fast food is not to get a great burger, it's to get someone else to make you a mediocre burger fast either because you're in a hurry or you're tired and you don't feel like cooking
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that a McDonald's cheeseburger is better than a homemade one lol
- It used to be fast and cheap, what happened to the cheap part?
- Yeah I get that. I just got used to it and now its just another thing I do all the time. Now I come home half dead and whip up a dinner no problem. The only reason I would recommend fast food over home cooking is if you are disabled.

I hate the use of the pedofascist's meme format but it's very fitting here.

That's stonetoss
This is srgrafo
- yes i'm taking about shitgrafo. Have people already forgotten about the chloe shit? Where he ran a subreddit for a sexualized loli character he made? And you didn't have to look far in his comment history to see examples of him being a smug right-wing creep.

I get it