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.
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.