• Formfiller@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I’m guessing it’s really to extract shareholder wealth and then declare bankruptcy once everything has trickled up

  • arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    5 days ago

    With how expensive fast food is now, you might as well just go to a slightly more expensive place and get a higher quality burger or whatever.

    • Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I used to love Wendy’s and went to Wendy’s a little while ago and just got a burger no fries nothing else and it was like 9 dollars. I was blown away and never want to go back. All these cheap chains jacked up their prices and saw temporary profits but then customers realize it’s not a good deal and stop going. Late stage capitalism really sucks.

    • ByteOnBikes@discuss.online
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      5 days ago

      Of all the fast food restaurants, I still go to Wendy’s like once a year. And you aren’t kidding. The 4 by 4 shrunk, and before, it was $4, but now $7.

      The one-use app coupons brought it back down. But f that noise.

      It’s still cheaper than the average lunch in my city, where meals cost $12-15.

    • Cheems@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      A lot of sit down restaurants are about the same quality as fast food used to be and twice as expensive. It’s just not worth it to eat out

      • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        That hasnt been my experience at all. If I go somewhere for 2x the cost of fast-food, the quality is usually far ahead

    • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      Wendys has the best deal on a meal that I know of, if you are really hurting. You can get the $6 bag which is about 800 calories plus drinks. You could technically survive on $7 a day there if you drink a few drinks while there.

      • arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        4 days ago

        I looked it up, and assuming I’m looking at the right one, the price and availability differ depending on location. I’d be kind of surprised if it’s that cheap where I live.

  • Dorkyd68@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Good. The quality is laughable and the price is horrendous. I used to love Wendy’s. In the last 10 years they’ve managed to become the worst fast food chain around

    • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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      4 days ago

      I noticed the same. I was all about Wendy’s back in the day. Then the good mobile deals left, the quality dropped, they changed their nugget recipe so it sucks ass and I can’t even eat the spicy nuggs anymore. Dave would be upset by the drop in quality.

    • Ibex@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Of course he will as will the shareholders see record profits. Doesn’t matter if they kill the brand to do so either.

    • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Wow, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million dollars! No wonder they’re not profitable!

  • TimboSlice@discuss.onlineOP
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    6 days ago

    Wendy’s was a big part of my coming of age days…1$ double stacks sustained me during my senior year in HS…These days their food is shitty and overpriced.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Yeah, we used to do the $4.20 meal. Four items off the dollar menu plus tax was $4.20, usually JBC, nugs, fries, frosted. Paired great with a joint. Many, many trips back in those days.

      NJ changed their state tax, and thus ruined the $4.20 meal.

  • Valentine Angell@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    In the late 80s and early 90s, Wendy’s was the best for dumpster diving. You could get a basketball-sized sphere of ground meat out of the trash around 2-3am. Peel off the outside inch or so, and you’d have meat for days.

    Dominoes dumpsters were another source of awesomeness back then. It was a very different time.

  • Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    The better of the national fast food chains imo. At least they used to be.

    Fast food is supposed to be cheap. No reason to eat at these places anymore.

    • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      To be fair, ingredients have continued to climb in price, especially beef. The fast food model was always unsustainable without sacrificing quality even further and raising prices.

      • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip
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        6 days ago

        Fast food likely would have been fine… if wages increased as much as the prices did.

        The fact that the minimum wage doesn’t increase every year, yet prices do, meant that this was always going to be a recipe for disaster.

      • revoirwinery@ttrpg.network
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        4 days ago

        The fast food model was always unsustainable without sacrificing quality even further and raising prices.

        Not true. The people making 6 or 7 figures could all take a hit to their salaries and that would translate to lower prices for customers.

        The problem is, why would they if they don’t have to?

      • Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Im not so sure.

        Apparently the current CEO is only worth about 6mil. Fast food isn’t like Tesla or twitter so no billionaires I guess. Idk. How much upper management is there, what’s their salary and how actually valuable is there work? It’s just fast food. What about wall Street investors, how much do they get. How much is wasted on ads? Lots of supply chains in fast food too.

        I just think when it comes to food there shouldn’t be any extreme wealth and profit. No megayachts, mansions, or Bentleys. I don’t see why the quality can’t be good, workers can’t be paid much better, and the prices can’t be cheaper. In our capitalist system some people are getting way more money that they did not earn and don’t deserve, at everyone else’s expense. But I admit I don’t know the numbers and 6mil for a CEO seems low (although I’d retire immediately with 6mil LOL).

  • InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    One thing I liked about Wendy’s is that the chain uses/used real vegetables on its burgers. Even the cheapest burger on the menu (the deluxe) has a real slice of tomato, an actual leaf or few of green lettuce, and a couple of rings of onion.

    Of the places I’ve eaten at in recent history, they’ve all clearly dropped in quality and increased in price to varying degrees. However, I’m surprised to see people say things like Wendy’s is the worst fast food chain because that doesn’t exactly align with my experience at all. And for the record, I’m not saying it’s great food, either, just that it’s not the worst by far. Obviously it’s a very subjective measure and there’s lots of variation from location to location or even between regions and it also probably depends on the types of things you’d typically order.

    To me, the worst offender of all the ones I’ve been to in the South and Midwest USA is Taco Bell, by far. At least for the things I would typically order, the price has gone up the most while the size and quality has gone down the most. While the service is sometimes good and sometimes bad, the food itself is consistently terrible seemingly regardless of location. No, it was never good food, but it’s definitely gone from meh to yuck.

    All that aside, Wendy’s doesn’t exactly strike me as the type of restaurant where closing stores makes the remaining ones more appealing. For that to work, it seems like the current stores would have to be too densely placed (i.e. Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks and a Starbucks in the store next to that Starbucks) OR the food would need to be good enough to actually motivate people to drive further away for it. Honestly, I know it’s not the latter, and from my experience, there are fewer Wendy’s than most other fast food chains, so it seems like the former wouldn’t apply either.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      KFC is the one that fills that spot for me. They use fresh ingredients but their volume on everything other than the buckets of chicken and salads is low enough that that fresh produce might start to go bad. I used to love their big crunches and chicken bowls, but it’s offputting when the potato in the chicken bowl tastes like it should have been used a few days ago or thrown out.

      It sucks because when they did use fresh fresh ingredients, they were stillpretty good, but when they used not so fresh fresh ingredients, they were bottom of the list. And most places can have bad moments, but I found KFC to be more consistently iffy rather than it being a blue moon thing.

      But busy locations are probably more consistently good because I’m guessing it’s due to managers/franchise owners trying to keep costs down at struggling locations.

  • iegod@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    They removed my favorite sandwich, the grilled chicken, from the menu. It had the best macros out of all fast food chains too :'(

  • FilthyHands@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Have they tried enhanced features like dynamic pricing and day-part offerings, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling?

    • pika@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      Them suggesting dynamic pricing is why I stopped going there. …Well that, and because for the prices they are already charging, I can simply get better quality food.

    • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
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      6 days ago

      Don’t give 'em ideas to drive it into the ground even faster! I didn’t GAF about the corporate jackasses, but plenty of low income people need their jobs - especially with what’s coming soon after all the fuckery Trump has been subjecting the country’s economy to.

  • jownz@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I used to love Wendy’s! Then one day they shrunk the patty/tomato/lettuce they put on the JBC to the point where the thing is like 80% bun and I was done with them.