It usually pays not to jump to conclusions.
Righteous outrage is one thing of course. Sometimes injustice and/or ridiculousness just lights a fire in you. But pretty much every time a business decision makes the news that provokes me to scream ‘Are you [expletive]s [swear word]ing high?’ at my screen, it turns out I’m overreacting to either a satirical publication, a provocative headline that obscures what’s actually going on, or just straight up misinformation. Sometimes a combo!
Take Wendy’s new AI menus and pricing options for instance. Check out this headline from Food & Wine:
Jawdropping. Swearworthy. And not entirely truthful.
What’s actually happening is that the fast food chain will be rolling out a combo of non-generative AI and fancier digital menus to take advantage of having a computer automatically change displays and offer specific upsales, combos, or suggestions in accordance with timing, traffic and even unofficial holidays.
So rather than having your burger and fries cost $15.75 at noon and $12.50 at night, we’re probably looking at something more like the menu suggesting a Frosty/fry combo for a twenty cents less than usual because the computer can see the weather jumped from a high of 72 to a low of 101 in a day.
“To clarify, Wendy’s will not implement surge pricing, which is the practice of raising prices when demand is highest. We didn’t use that phrase, nor do we plan to implement that practice,” a Wendy’s spokesperson told NBC.
They added there are “no plans” to raise prices at high-demand times.
Now of course “no plans” doesn’t mean anything. I heard there were “no plans” for further cuts to personnel about 30 days before I got laid off one of the six separate times it happened. And in the age of constant atrocities coming at us in the news, owners and shareholders alike can usually rest secure that the outrage that outpoured at the very idea of further jacking up the prices of our favorite trash food will probably be totally forgotten once they actually implement things next year.
Nevertheless, I feel it’s most likely that people just got things wrong from the jump. Even the people who approved and wanted to assure us future fast food flim-flammery was fine (for whatever odd reason).
Takeaways here are:
Use the same specificity on internal communiqué that you would in a press release, since you never know what’s going to get leaked or shared or misinterpreted.
And:
Don’t use jargon to sugarcoat what you know consumers are going to hate. ‘Dynamic pricing’ would never be taken to mean ‘surge pricing’ if people didn’t already hate the former phrase and what it represents to the wallet so much. It’s a square/rectangle thing as far as definitions go—all surge pricing is a type of dynamic pricing, but not all dynamic pricing is surge pricing.
As for me, I’m glad I left this coverage on the grill a little longer. Accuracy tastes better than freshness every time.
