Sophia White-
How would you like it if you went out to pick up some Wendy’s chicken nuggets? Decent, right? Munching on some chicken in the privacy of your own home. But then, you notice the receipt. What once was 1.99 for 4 chicken nuggets is now 5 bucks? Doesn’t make sense.
So, you march down to your local Wendy’s and give yourself a little Karen moment. Yet, you are stopped short by a manager explaining the new pricing implementation. It sounds awfully sketchy and like they are trying to sell it off as a good thing for customers, but in reality, it just rakes in more profits for the fast food corporation. This is called surge pricing.
Wendy’s official statement on the new pricing policy refuses to acknowledge that it is surge pricing, but when you look at how the policy works, it has systems in place that work just the same as surge pricing for a business like Uber. According to financial news website The Street, “surge pricing (a subcategory of dynamic or flexible pricing) refers to a sales strategy in which a company raises the prices of its products or services during times (and in places) with higher demand.”
It makes sense for businesses like Uber or Amazon to implement this into their business systems. With Uber, when the demand for rides increases, the prices go up and it shows this on the app for riders to decide whether or not they want to ride now or wait. The app makes it very clear that this is an increase of the original price. Yet, it is becoming common for other businesses to steal the model of surge pricing but make it look like it is not an increase but a decrease instead.
With Wendy’s website, they are achieving this by increasing prices overall, but then making the consumer believe they are getting a discount through imaging of discount hours. It’ll show up as a discount on the website between such and such hours, but it is actually the original price of the food or drink before surge pricing. It may look like you are receiving a discount, but it is just the original price being made to look like a value deal to the customer. I think it is pretty deceitful to say you are lowering prices as a corporation, but very clearly increasing prices and gaslighting consumers into thinking that you have “discount hours” when they were the original price.
Since this new policy was announced by Wendy’s on social media, there has been a roar of backlash from the public regarding the rage around surge pricing in fast food. Wendy’s is a restaurant that garners a loyal customer base and relies heavily on that over the fame of its food. Changing your pricing policies will make it really difficult for Wendy’s to keep some of that loyal customer base with the flippy-floppy messaging they are sending out to consumers. People are considering boycotting Wendy’s to stop this policy, but the reality is that if a different fast food place implemented this pricing strategy, like Chick-fil-A, people would still come. Places that are notorious for their food and their long lines would profit immensely from surge pricing strategies as the public might complain about it, but at the same time, they aren’t going to give up their Chick-fil-A just because of a little higher of a price due to what time it is.
This is the current concern with surge pricing methods. The current way that things are going, it appears as though surge pricing is going to become the new norm in other times of service. Even if they aren’t even services that require this kind of strategy to help their workers. It is more about the benefit of profits rather than for their workers. It might start with a place like Wendy’s that not many people go to other than their loyal customers, but then it’ll start being places like Chick-fil-A that are always packed with lines around the building during certain hours. My concern is that this will become the new norm for corporation pricing strategies and then problems with affordability will become even more difficult for people who are entering the workforce and the housing market in the next few years. Fast food is genuinely addictive and also genuinely expensive if it is coming out of your budget constantly. This model appears to be genuinely dangerous for students like us, and we should be looking into how to change this economic outlook for ourselves and others in the next few years.