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by _manifold 849 days ago
Several years ago there was a craft beer joint in my area that had a gimmicky "stock market" system for their pricing - the more a certain beer was purchased, the higher its price became, and the less popular brews slowly dropped in price to stimulate demand. Ultimately, they dropped this system for being "too irritating" and moved to a standard static pricing model.

It sounds like the Wendy's thing is based more on time of day and historical analysis of sales, so we will have to see how it plays out. But I think and the end of the day people will become more annoyed when their favored menu item is more expensive simply because they arrived at the restaurant sooner than they expected, or whatever other criteria Wendy's starts basing their pricing on. Having price tracking on their app does seem like the next logical step, but ultimately an annoying gamification (and vaguely dystopian) in my opinion.

Perhaps their customer base feels different and they've done their research on that - I'm not in that group so I'm more of a bystander here.