Week 3: Wendy’s and Survey Creating

Is dynamic pricing beneficial or harmful in the food industry? Hello, and welcome back to my blog! 

I want to go back to something that I said in an earlier blog entry, the fact that Wendy’s will be implementing dynamic pricing. When I first heard this news, I thought it was the stupidest decision that a chain like Wendy’s could make. Dynamic pricing is based on things like location, demand, and inventory. Because of this fact, my thought process was something along the lines of “if you went to a Wendy’s in the city comparatively to say one on the side of a highway, you’re automatically paying higher prices just because of the location” and “if you went to a Wendy’s at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, you’d be being a higher amount than someone who went to the same location and lets say 1 am in the morning.” Because of these thoughts, I assumed that they would immediately lose business, but after talking to a friend about them, he brought up an interesting point, that it could actually attract more customers because people would be drawn to the lower prices, and it could also encourage people to buy more because of the lower prices. Wendy’s also claimed that despite them calling it dynamic pricing (which does raise prices) they would only be lowering prices in less busy periods of the day. This whole situation is very interesting to me and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out and if it will be beneficial or harmful for them. 

I spent a lot of time this week continuing to research people to interview because considering that is where I will be getting a majority of my research from, I will want as many people as I can in order to gain a large enough data sample size for my project. I hope to interview people specifically in the concert and airline industries because that is the focus of my research. However, I also hope to talk to other professionals in fields where dynamic pricing is utilised in order to grasp a more widespread knowledge of the subject.

I also spent time working on my survey and curating the questions. I hope to complete that over the next week and start sending it out the week after that to start collecting data and also have it supplement my current research even more. I’m planning to ask questions that will help me understand how widely dynamic pricing is understood and consumer’s opinions on the subject. 

Thank you for tuning into my blog this week and I look forward to sharing more findings with you next week!