Wendy’s is set to close hundreds of restaurants as customers struggling financially cut back on dining out.
Interim CEO Ken Cook announced on an earnings call Friday that the fast food chain will close a “mid single-digit percentage” of locations. With about 6,000 restaurants, Wendy’s could shutter between 200 to 350 locations.
Cook said some restaurants are expected to close as early as later this year, and locations will continue to shutter in 2026.
The burger I normally get has gone from $1.89 to $2.35… AND the threshold for coupons is now $5…
So Wendy’s has lost me as a customer. If I ate 2 JR Hamburgers and a large Fry I’d never get anything done
Im definitely a part of this as when I did get fast food wendys was higher than some others like mcdonalds due to price/quality ratio.
Do you think capitalism would be more successful if the people running it weren’t too stupid to understand that consumers need money to buy things.
Well they are mostly rewarded for threading the line. And if they go to much one way then everyone ends up poor, they shutter a few restaurants and get to invest in cheap properties for the next few years while waiting for tax payers to bail out the economy.
They aren’t stupid, up and downs are part of why it works so well for them.
No
CEO Ken Cook
Clearly he Kennot
Ken’t
He’s not Kennough.
What’s his pay? Can he take a pay cut and save the stores?
They’re surely hammering out the details as we speak. No leader will just throw their people under the bus.
Ken Cooked
I wonder if it has anything to do with the 13$ cheeseburgers
They’re cheaper than other fast food in my experience
*$13. You saved no time in typing it wrong and look stupid. Congratulations.
Come here and gargle my balls loser.
Just as a minor pedantic point, it’s gurgle. Gargle is what you do with a liquid, like mouthwash. When you attempt the same with a solid object it’s gurgle.
at least they dont look like a complete jackass
When i speak, I say thirteen dollars. When I write, I sometimes don’t reverse it 13$ means I was typing as i speak and not like an accountant making a report or something.
Language prescriptivism in the big 25
Have they SEEN the prices in their restaurants??? Who the fuck wants to pay eight to nine dollars for a salad (especially when that salad is now much smaller than it was six months ago… I fucking saw that Wendy’s and will not be ordering again).
Maybe part of the problem is that eating at Wendy’s is now apparently “dining out.”
Capitalism is a failed experiment
Normally I’d even go a step further and challenge the idea that capitalism even exists in the postmodern world, but honestly stores shutting down because they aren’t making enough money to continue operating is capitalism working as intended, not the opposite. And for once, that’s a good thing.
Most forms of economic system, particularly central economic planning, would tend to choose stores based on metric other than whether they were actually cashflow positive, resulting in higher resource utilization, lower efficiency, and so worse outcomes overall.
Because Wendy’s won’t be using that building any longer, a different restaurant could take its place, and see if it can build a profitable business in its place. In my city, a local business took over such a building, and they make the best burgers on locally made buns in the city.
A new business could take it’s place if landlords would lower the cost of the rent after it sits empty for a while. I hear they often do not as lowering the rent lowers the building value.
I’m sure the people who worked at all those places for their living don’t mind.
You are dismissing human suffering to simp for the system causing the suffering
The system is called reality.
The problem we face is that there is unlimited desires, but limited resources. That problem was written into the laws of the universe when the big bang occurred and a finite amount of energy produced a finite amount of matter.
Before a single homonid existed on earth, there was a limited amount of material on earth, a limited amount of energy available, a limited amount of space. Before a single homonid existed on earth, animals required food, shelter, heat, cool, and clean water.
The Oxygen Catastrophe is an amazing extinction event where most life on earth was photosynthesizing CO2, and in spite of the early earth having about 20 atmospheres worth of CO2 the Earth effectively ran out and afterwards the atmosphere was composed of mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Amazing to think that there was a resource that abundant, that was effectively completely used up by life, before multi-cellular life even began in earnest.
That extinction event killed almost all life on Earth, and ushered in an ice age that killed even more. That’s life, and it isn’t fair. Much of the life that remained had to adapt. Much life adapted to utilize this new oxygen waste. You and I utilize that waste material. Some photosynthesizers still exist, adapted to high levels of oxygen and low levels of CO2. Today, we live in a world that cycles between O2 and CO2, that’s the only way we can survive.
In about 250 million years, continental drift will form a new supercontinent, which will likely destroy most life on Earth. In about 750 million years, the luminosity of the dying sun will rise to the point that life on Earth will no longer be able to exist. A few billion years after that, the sun will run out of material, and will stop altogether. The solar system will slowly freeze for countless aeons. No life will survive that long. This is the end point of our reality.
Systems that pretend reality doesn’t exist, that this isn’t the end point of everything, they’re doomed because magic isn’t real and every decision is a trade-off between multiple competing and true things.
99.95% of life on Earth died in the oxygen catastrophe. 350 Wendy’s stores might close, laying off all their employees. Unlike the life that died in the oxygen catastrophe, the employees of those 350 Wendy’s can get new jobs, the real estate can be repurposed for new businesses that might not fail, and even capital equipment like ovens or deep fryers can be reused.
Central planners like to pretend they can prevent catastrophe, but all it does is change the terms of disaster. Instead of “Which locations objectively sell enough product to justify their existence”, often it becomes a war of nepotism, favoritism, lobbyists, and political favors. You can ask the empires of the Bronze Age Collapse how that worked out for them, but you can’t because of them, only the ancient Egyptians survived, every civilization of the middle east fell. Some fell and were erased from history altogether by people who wanted to forget the horrors of for example the Minoans. New civilizations rose eventually in the same regions, but new ones that did things differently. Eventually, even the Egyptians fell to the Greeks under Alexander.
Life requires suffering and limitation. Life requires constant adaption. Life requires successfully dealing with reality. Anyone who tells you differently, they’re not telling you the truth, and any system that suggests you can avoid these truths will aways fail against systems that model reality more correctly.
The positive thing is that a system like capitalism when it’s working correctly (I’m not saying it does always, I’m not a modernist who believes you can fit everything in the world in one box) means that the Wendy’s employees don’t die, they just have to find new jobs, and perhaps that building will be bought by a new company that does things differently, or sells something different, and is more likely to provide enough useful goods or services that it can support itself. If it does, then instead of the result being a net human suffering, it’ll be a net human positive. Perhaps that neighborhood actually needed a local restaurant in that spot. Perhaps it actually needed a book store. People who have an idea can take a risk and give it a shot, and maybe it survives and thrives, maybe it fails too and the cycle starts again.
you’re the only one talking about Central planning, and writing multipage nonsequiturs.
capitalism is a failed experiment.
That’s silly. It worked great for centuries. Now we are facing a new situation where it does not work and creates problems it cannot solve which is why we should look to a new system.
We have been under the control of Capitalists for at least the last 150 years, and humanity hasn’t gone extinct yet
This can be said about literally any economy or social system ever…
The propaganda about people living better under capitalism than previous systems is just propaganda
Im not claiming we need to perpetuate capitalism. Im saying the opposite because it did work really well and brought a ton of people out of poverty. Now it’s killing the planet and we need a collectivist solution to that problem. Capitalusm is by nature not collectivist and will never address our environmental collapse.
I just want to be the nerd that says if the system started and worked well enough to sustain itself to a point, and then stopped working, that would be a failed experiment right.
No because governments are not experiments. There are times when differing system’s strengths make for a better choice than others. For example representative democracy works great when almost everyone can read and do math. Representative democracy is a shitshow if most have no education because you need an informed population to make sound choices.
I haven’t been out to eat since the pandemic. I got used to cooking my own meals. The prices have gotten ridiculous for what you get, and the service sucks. They can all go out of business for all I care.
Aren’t groceries in the US quite a bit more expensive than eating at a restaurant? As a European this always amazed me. But I think you’re on the right track here eating less processed food, even if it costs a bit more.
No, not at all. I can make all sorts of good, healthy, inexpensive meals for less than the cost of fast food. While it is true that grocery prices have risen quite a bit in the last year, it’s still way cheaper than eating out, and much better for you.
In a few cases where you are making something once it can be more expensive because you can’t buy one teaspoon of a spice or have to buy more than you need. This is only true with uncommon ingredients as well, since they tend to be higher priced in a store relative to what restaurants pay for bulk purchases.
Initially there is cookware to purchase and upkeep, and things like that.
But if you make more than one meal from the same prep, or serve multiple people, eating at home is almost always cheaper in the long run as nearly everything in the kitchen lasts for years at a minimum and often a lifetime. Especially if you plan long term and get staples in bulk when it makes sense and buy more expensive things when they are on sale.
Cookware is all but free in America. Spend a Saturday hitting garage sales as they close down and people are giving stuff away. Wife toted a load home last week, $.25 an item or free, couple of things were $1.
Had a couple of toaster ovens at the flea market, one labelled FREE, no one even looked at them.
No? What gave you that idea?
I heard this from friends that lived in New York. But it might be just a biased opinion. Happy to hear it’s not true though.
Your friend is either an idiot, or so far removed from what it takes to get by as normal people that he’s like the 10 dollar banana Michael meme.
So I just went to do a roughly like to like comparison.
So the mainstream burger at Wendy’s is currently about 5.69 where I live.
I can get the supplies needed to make about 6 equivalent burgers for about 25, so about 4.17 a burger. Mostly because beef is pretty expensive right now.
Realistically speaking i would cook something other than burgers, but closest to like.
I suspect pricing out salads would be crazy more in favor of grocery, since Wendy’s charges a lot for salads.
If you compare the cheapest burger to the most expesnive cut of steak or something they are. Often people do make such comparisons because they that is what they are cooking at home vs what they eat when they go out. You can buy premade frozen burgers you just microwave to cook as well - I’ve only seen the price in vending machines where they are more than a fast food burger but you can get them at grocery stores too.
But if you are cooking real meals with similar ingredients it is cheaper to cook at home.
This is the MOST Terrible news I’ve heard ALL YEAR! Have they tried Raising Prices and Lowering Wages in response? That USUALLY works!
not to mention offers from local places that are not chains are close to if not cheaper than the fake foods at the fast-food places
and the sweet tea at the fast-food places sit in urns that are not well maintained and the ones that use the tubes to automate drink filling are not cleaned and the tubes are dirty as fuck
sweet tea is so much better at the local joints and usually cleaner and way fresher like the food
Wendy’s used to be excellent. Then Dave Thomas died.
It was so fast too. I remember the fries got smaller and then the frosties did too. Then the Big bacon classic became a thing of the past. Now if you are under 25 i don’t think you even remember who Dave was.
sweet tea is so much better at the local joints and usually cleaner and way fresher like the food
I can get fresh squeezed limeade at my local mexican corner store/tortilla shop and it’s so fucking good.
That’s an oddly specific and focused take on food service. Not wrong, just not something that most people (around here) think about when considering fast food.
Cleanliness of the drink fountains is a thought many people have.
I’m not picky with fast food, but the local Wendy’s is revolting. Only went in there for the chili sauce, now that’s not enough to tempt me. The Burger King is even worse and the McDonald’s get worse with each visit.
Removed by mod
Make the mushroom melt a regular item and I’ll eat there weekly
