I am in.
Boycott!!
But a silent boycott where I do not need to actually show up.
Not at all. How’s this for a restaurant’s advertising.
“Come and eat our fine food. Extra 20% surcharge for dining at dinner time.” It’s the same thing, except presented the other way around… Perspective matters.
In “old” media, it was a punchline on The Daily Show, Colbert, and Kimmel. I didn’t see Fallon that night but I would be surprised if it wasn’t in the monologue there as well. I have seen web reports on NPR, CNBC, MSNBC and CNN. So, yeah, it certainly got traction, and they quickly realized the faux pas and tried to fix it.
I think there is a false equivalence here. Happy hours and early bird specials occur at fixed times during the day. Customers are okay with that because they still retain control of how much they want to spend. What Wendy’s was suggesting was dynamic pricing where prices vary in real time. That’s very different. In this case, customers have no idea what the price of their meal will be until they can see the electronic menu. Or perhaps in the extreme case, not until they place their order.
Nobody likes dynamic pricing when it occurs with airlines or ride sharing or road tolls. They put up with it because there aren’t many alternatives. That’s not the case with fast food. Proposing to do something unpopular when customers have a lot of alternative choices is a bit shocking.
So if Wendy’s had proposed a happy hour from 4-5PM where fries are half off, nobody would care. But dynamic pricing where the price of those fries depends on how many people are in line kinda sucks.
5 Likes