They are missing the Seattle Lower Queen Anne Taco Bell/KFC combo store that is known to be the most expensive Taco Bell in the nation.
https://locations.tacobell.com/wa/seattle/210-w--mercer-st-....
Anyways, you hear horror pricing stories about this one store.
Apparently the prices are scraped from the mobile app. I installed the mobile app and for some reason, and that location can’t be found inside the mobile app. Actually, you cannot (I can’t anyway) order from that location from the website either.
It just goes to show data cleaning is hard. It’s true for statistics and it’s probably just as true for LLMs.
Why does Taco Bell have an app? What is its purpose?
U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the restaurant profitable. (Land cost is the other big expense.)
None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering).
As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
Oh for sure, speaking to a cashier is the quickest/best, and scrolling on a screen (kiosk or app) is slower/worst. I'm just pointing out that if the store will reduce conversations with cashiers by shifting ordering to a screen, then the app is far superior to the kiosk: order before you arrive, avoid germs, frictionless invocation of the loyalty program, etc.
They did some tests in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIj3pXOKjs
and came to the conclusion that order accuracy is the best if you use the app.
I find it very convenient. I can place an order, walk in and pick it up. There’s no wait involved. Other people have also agreed that it’s convenient.
I do.
Saves having to wait on a line at the drive thru. Or on a line inside the store. Nope, can't do that: they don't take orders at the cashier, so you have to use the kiosks which take even longer.
So I use the app to order while at home, drive to the restaurant and grab my food and leave.
also, there's only so many kiosks available just like there's only so many human staffed registers. This means there's potential for waiting in line. If every one has an app, there's no line. Ever. Well, except for when you show up to pick up your order and have to wait for everyone else.
Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
The app makes it so your food is ready soon after you arrive. You can spend all the time browsing the menu and ordering before arriving at the physical location and then the food is already prepared or is made upon your arrival.
Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.
I just typed "taco" in the search bar of Safari and the second autocomplete result was for the restaurant 1.7 miles from me, the third was for the tacobell.com. Easy!
In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot.
As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances.
There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
You found a link to tacobell.com, that's great, but you're like 1/10 of the way there now. You have to open it, load all the resources, give it permission to use your location so you can find which store to order from, place the order, enter your payment information, and then move to your email app to get order updates. An app caches all of that locally, has your information saved, is pre-cleared for location permissions, etc.
This is true. I wonder if there is any difference in the $ amount of food ordered using iOS/Android apps now vs food ordered using cgi-bin then.
I don't mind the minor inconveniences of the web like approving a location check. My email client provides very good tools for dealing with spam, notifications and spam notifications. If a brand wants to make their web site load excessive resources that is their loss because the site will be slow and drive people to another brand.
Back in the day people were much less into the e-commerce habit and not using mobile technology so they weren't ordering food on the go.
Another question is "What relationship to people have to fast food?"
I worked at a company that did geospatial analysis such as retail location selection. We had a theory that people chose fast food because they were on the way from point A to point B so the right way to think about it was not about the density of commercial or residential development in an area but rather about the density of trips that pass by a point. I was involved in a pilot project to use touchscreens to collect data at the POS just before the mobile age made it possible to collect trip data directly.
Thus my consumption of fast food is opportunistic: I eat at Taco Bell sometimes because it is in a neighborhood with a Wal-Mart, Gamestop, Petsmart, Staples, an illegal cannabis dispensary (not like I can't get better weed elsewhere), award-winning wine store, etc. I get hungry On most days I would go to the street taco stand on the other side of the parking lot. which has the best tacos I've seen outside Los Angeles but if it is Sunday maybe I go to the Bell. It's not like the scene in Demolition Man where Sylvester Stalone goes to a fancy dinner at Taco Bell because "all restaurants are Taco Bell" in the future.
If I am traveling maybe I am driving down the freeway and see a sign for a Burger King and stop. Maybe I walk out of the Oculus at the WTC site and see both a Chopt and a BK and, even though I have a BK gift card in my pocket, the line looks really long at the BK and I go to the Chopt because it is really fast food.
I can see that Taco Bell wants to develop a special relationship with me but I don't want to develop one with Taco Bell. Really I don't find it easy to install an app (until I broke my old iPad, my old iPad insisted that I log in with my Apple account password whenever I wanted to install an app despite the fingerprint scanner working just fine for everything else. I don't know my Apple account password because I keep it in a password manager and the app store was the one thing that would make me require to use it when I am on the go. When I bought a new iPad this cleared up. I go to the Bell maybe 4 times a year, it is just not worth having another app cluttering up my device making it harder to find the apps that really matter to me.
There are solutions to every problem you cited. As an example, you can search on an iPhone.
Apps are used for data collection and marketing via notifications. That's the real value, not saving time for the user. The user is rewarded with the ability to avoid lines and targeted discounts.
The app works better for the drive thru, and also for families with kids that like to push buttons on the giant ipad.
Speaking of which, we stopped going to fast food burger places because 75% of them can’t make things like “a hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup”, or “a cheeseburger with no other toppings”.
I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants.
Oddly, I’ve noticed there is no correlation between speaking english as a first language and being able to understand those orders.
I think this would lead to a lot of really frustrating errors in a food ordering context. In my experience LLM speech recognition is really prone to inserting or removing negation words, which can really shift the meaning. This is a problem in any speech recog use case but there's often sufficient context to understand when the error has occurred. In a list of what a customer does / doesn't want, there is no additional context to fill the gap.
"Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion no tomato" -> "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion tomato" or the inversion
You can correct this to some degree with an order confirmation step but the error rate would mean a lot of customers need to make a correction, which adds time to the process and increases customer frustration.
At that point I'd rather the drive thru have a touchscreen and just let me input the order directly, versus having to argue with an LLM about which ingredients i want included or excluded.
“A hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup.”
Try:
“A hamburger with only ketchup.”
When you take hundreds of orders a day, circular communications won’t stick.
I was reading Graham's On Lisp which works a nice example of Augmented Transition Networks which were popular in the 1970s for writing parsers that could parse controlled vocabularies. For that matter I remember similar kinds of grammar to control voice response applications for platforms like TellMe circa 2001. I bet it would do fine for food ordering.
(This is why a non-native speaker can do this job well, you don't need to know a lot of the language to parse orders like 芥兰牛肉)
Kiosks need an app as well, but also custom hardware, cleaning, etc, and customers can't order in advance. You could have a website, but lots of people currently expect an app.
They also have kiosks and a web site.
I wonder what the income disparity is between minimum-wage Taco Bell employees and Pepsi’s executive team is, and how much the difference has grown in the last 20 years. I would be willing to bet that the company could, in reality, afford not to replace human jobs and still pull in huge profits/pay their shareholders and corporate officers quite a lot of money without requiring a bunch of my personal information in order to buy the worst taco I’ve ever had.
Fast food workers are not minimum wage. I don't know about Taco Bell, but McDonald's has had signs up offering $18/hr in the Bay Area for a while which is like $3 more.
Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers.
There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. It’s just another way to lower costs at the expense of non wealthy people. Why do you think it’s so hard to find help in any big box store nowadays? Or why most of them only have one or two cashiers working when lines get longer and longer?
PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
Depends on demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
That wasn't in 2024. It's $20 now.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Fast-Food-Minimum-Wage-FAQ.htm
lots of fast food have apps that track purchasing and give you coupons or deals that you can't get just ordering in the store now. It's like loyalty cards for McDonald's or tb.
This is the real answer. Price discrimination used to involve physical coupons, but now the coupons are in the app. Since apps are easier to obtain (and have in your pocket at all times) than physical coupons, the price discrepancy (between full price and discounted price) is wider than ever, to ensure revenue is sustained despite the higher percentage of discounted orders. That means high menu prices making the news, ostensibly due only to costs (inflation, minimum wage, rent, etc.) but actually due in part to app discounting.
I installed the Wendy's app a while back, and by optimizing my selections, all of my orders since then have cost less than half of menu prices on average. For example, get a $3 item for $1 with any other purchase (so you tack on a $1 frosty), or buy a $6 item get another free. Taco Bell's app deals aren't quite as deep but you get the point. When tons of people are placing orders this way, menu prices must creep up to compensate.
I've come to realize I don't want to put that kind of brain energy into ordering fast food. So I just stopped going. I make up some refried beans and some meat (normally chili verde) and freeze them (separately) for when I want 'fast food'. If I have to play (and learn how to maximize) some corporate dark pattern games then nah, I'm good bro.
The friction of playing the game is how price discrimination has always worked, whether clipping coupons or fiddling with apps. You either spend time to pay less (and perhaps brag about it to make smalltalk just like this, which is like volunteer advertising) or you spend more to save time.
It's weird, but it's actually an incredible way for the more well-off to subsidize the less well-off (at the risk of enticing some folks, who have the means but love a deal, to be penny-wise pound-foolish at everyone's expense including their own). At the end of the day, more people get fed at the price point they can deal with.
If no one did this, wouldn't that just mean that the price discrepancy kept rising and rising?
That's an interesting point! For simplicity, let's divide into 3 segments: poor, middle, rich. Poor can only pay with coupons, rich can't be bothered/seen and only pay full price, middle can pay in full but some of them decide to use coupons because it's deemed worthwhile (so really 4 segments). Suppose middle doesn't exist, and prices are set in a way where tons of poor people are fed while also maximizing profit from rich people; perhaps this means giving the poor a 50% discount.
Now introduce the middle. The portion of them paying with coupons is anywhere from 0% to 100%. The restaurant makes massive profits from them at 0%, and makes no profits from them (but covers all costs) at 100%. Let's say it starts near 0% because initially nobody knows about coupons and over time rises near 100% once the information has spread around. Profits decrease so something must be done to counter that. Shallower discounts (say, 25% off instead of 50% off) is a possibility, keeping the discrepancy tight, as you suggest. But increasing menu prices, while leaving the huge discrepancy, is also a possibility!
Either method will get the profits to the desired level. But only one method -- maintaining the large discrepancy -- sustains the goal of maximizing the number of poor people fed. Therefore, a restaurant with that goal will choose that method; a restaurant without that goal simply won't issue coupons. The discrepancy, if one exists, is therefore constant regardless of how many penny-wise pound-foolish people are in the middle.
My McDonald's app has a daily 25% off coupon. I feel like it's a glitch but it has been persistent for over a year. Two of us can eat for $13
This. 30 minutes ago I ordered 4 of those $5 meal deals for my family of 4, applied the 20% off coupon and we all ate for $17 after tax. Hard to beat that.
Yep, they raised the menu prices but put generous once a day coupons in the app to do price discrimination for frequent customers.
Many of their stores don't have cashier's. You have to use a kiosk or the app.
The weirdest experience I had was a local burger joint I walked into that was completely empty with nobody eating there and nobody working at the counter and it didn't help that the decor was completely "blacked out". My first impression was that it wasn't open but I placed my order on a (ordinary sized) tablet and got my food and the people who came out to serve it were really nice.
The other day I was at McD's and an elderly lady was stressin' it because she had no idea what to do. There were two cash registers but nobody staffing them and a disorganized group of people waiting for their food and not even a clear queue for the people behind the counter to see that somebody was waiting. She asked me what to do and I told her she could order at the register but a minute later I realized I was standing in front of the register waiting for my food and that probably the workers wouldn't see her. I stepped out of the way and made sure she was highly visible at the register and when I got my food I told the worker that this woman was waiting for her food and she seemed quite annoyed but I didn't feel I could take it for granted they were paying attention.
I've been to a couple of McD's where they outright refuse to acknowledge you if you just standing in front of the register. They really want you to use the kiosks, and I'm not even sure that they have people other than a supervisor trained to use the registers.
The elderly lady was probably doing what mom does when presented with a kiosk, pretending to be too dumb to click on a picture of the food they want.
My local McD's won't even take orders at the register. They'll come over and show you how to use the kiosk if you're having trouble.
For our rural area with relatively low population, it makes sense. But even in the suburbs nearby, Chipotle, etc., are going to online-ordering only.
Someone should invent a way to communicate without requiring a a 1:n app for every destination. They should make some kind of n:n web that connects everyone to every destination.
The n:n web won’t win unless the destinations make money directly from traffic.
I stopped at roadside plaza and was completely cultural illiterate on how to order food.
100 miles from my home.
(1) Studies have shown that patron will make larger and more frequent orders when placed through an app rather than in person. This increases revenues.
(2) The app gathers statistics. Marketing and sales are so addicted to massive amounts of all kinds of information they have trouble finding veins that are not collapsed and their coworkers all carry naloxone. In most organizations, the marketing and sales people make most product decisions and a mobile app is a (free) product distributed by the chain.
(3) Data collection. Not only can anonymized data be monetized, but selling data directly attributable to individuals is a major source of revenue for many organizations, and I doubt Taco Bell (or Yum! Brands in general) is not among them.
In addition, price discrimination: you can offer deals in the app to price-sensitive consumers that don't cannibalise in-store sales from convenience-sensitive ones. Same concept as couponing.
Which is a roundabout way to say what they actually do, which is to offer "price sensitive" consumers the same prices they used to offer everyone if they are willing to go through stupid hoops worth of "deals" and "coupons" and "engage with our app every day or else your Good Little Consumer (tm) score goes down and we stop giving you discount pricing", and then raise the prices for everyone else.
Price discrimination is about raising prices.
You think coupons and deals (e.g. the constant stream of BOGOs, late-night specials, et cetera) are new?
I absolutely believe that these per-chain apps collect gobs of data, but I'm curious as to how valuable that actually is for them.
Any idea what the going rate is for the kind of data that could feasibly be collected from restaurant apps?
I would imagine they let you order food and then when you arrive your food is already made?
Essentially yes, except they make it when you arrive (at least if you pick up in the drive through). This is good design, because food from Taco Bell has an expiration date of about 3 minutes after it's cooked. It's good (well, not good, but it's food) right when it comes out, but once it cools down a bit it becomes essentially inedible.
The craziest thing anyone ever did was reheat a 5-layer beefy burrito.
The purpose of the McDonalds app seems to be to replace cashiers. I assume the Taco Bell app was created for the same reason.
I assume many/most of the people regularly eating at these places are very price sensitive. And, especially with demographic shifts in the West, non-premium places are going to be doing everything in their power to replace employees with automation and self-service. A lot of shoppers may grumble but they'll go with the lower prices.
The goal of the mcd app is to generate growth metrics in the tech domain to inflate their ticker value through data mining, and coercion is happening through i flating prices and then offering discounts just by downloading the apps. It's absolutely rubbish short sightedness to price pressure people into using your app.
Techno fascism never looked so bland
Theoretically you can order from it and you order is ready when you arrive. The last time I tried this, I had my passenger try and place our order. At the end of the process the app let us know we can't order online from that store.
So my conclusion it is just a data harvesting scheme.
FWIW, as one data point, this is what I've used it for a few times, and it worked without issue. (A co-working space has it next door and that made it a lot more time-efficient, avoiding the line and having to wait in store.)
Though I have run into the problem you've described with other services, where it rejects your request much later than it should. Like with AWS letting you configure a server for launch before informing you that you don't have permission to launch servers:
http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...
I’ve never used it, but I’ve used the Starbucks app a bunch. Order on the app when I’m 5-10 mins away, and can just roll up and grab my food/drink, vs waiting in line, ordering/paying, then waiting for prep. Useful when you’re tight on time or just don’t feel like waiting. I assume the Taco Bell app is similar.
Just to add more comments to this:
0. You can set up favorite orders, and get all the nutrition info you care to. And make fiddly custom orders without worrying someone will screw up typing it in.
1. They don't have to pay a cashier to type in your order if you do it for them. And it's more likely to be correct, and more likely to make upsells (would you like to add a drink to your order?). More cynically, you can't complain that their cashier doesn't understand English since you are now the cashier.
2. Price discrimination. Fast food is an unusual mix of fast and cheap, and not everyone values those two equally. Cheap customers can spend time clipping coupons and browsing app deals while fast customers can make their order via drive through without having to futz around while driving. The app replaces newspaper circulars and mailers, esp now that nobody subscribes to local news anymore.
3. You can order ahead, increasing table turn time, spending less time at their limited seating and limited parking. And you spend less time waiting in line to order, waiting for your order to be prepared.
4. It functions as a loyalty program, buy 10 get one free style (but a bit more complicated).
5. Less fighting over coupons at the counter for the franchisees that don't want to accept them - the app just refuses them. And frankly, some of the penny pincher franchisees may not be savvy enough to set up refusals.
6. If a location runs out of something they can flag it and you won't show up disappointed they can't fill your order. Or they can advertise a per-store menu.
Can’t tell if serious.
Everything has an app. And pretty soon everything will have an “AI”.
I liken it to the impulse aisle at the grocery store.
In my experience, they will send you discounts (BOGO) or free stuff when you're most likely to buy. One of my teammates and I both installed their mobile app. I would get free coupons for like nachos or a taco on the days that I regularly went, usually in the mornings and the coupons were only good for about 24 hours. Conversely, my hockey teammate used to get his later in the afternoon because he was religious about stopping on the way home from our gams which was usually pretty late at night.
They're banking on (and usually right) that if they give you a small carrot for something free, you'll use the app to buy more stuff. In my experience it really took a lot for me to not buy more than I needed. So I would include the freebie along with whatever else I was buying to try and save a buck or two. Whereas my teammate would get his normal order plus whatever freebie they were offering.
either way, it worked. Many times instead of going somewhere else, I would go there, and use their mobile app and get my freebies.
To order food. You can also place your order on the website.
Targeted offers to make you order, think promos they offer through the app instead of blasting it on TV commercials it's much cheaper, loyalty rewards and also order for pick up to save time.
I don't have taco bell app, experience is from international McDonald's app
Not specific to taco bell but I like to order in person personally, but will seek out an app if I have a large order to put in and want to make sure I get all the adjustments right.
Taking mobile orders usually requires accepting coupons/rewards programs which franchise owners are not always obligated to participate.
I wonder if there are any airport located Taco Bells. Those kind of captive locations are notorious for crazy prices.
IIUC, virtually all of the crazy airport prices come from management companies like HMS Host, Sodexo, etc - which manage most of the restaurants and stores in airports.
Their business model is - they big up the price of all the available spots such that no one can make money unless they charge exorbitant prices. After they capture the majority of the market, they're free to charge a ton of money.
How they haven't been charged for collusion and price fixing is beyond me.
Anyway, typically, if you find a huge brand like Starbucks or McDonald's - or a brand that owns all its locations (not franchised) like Chipotle, the prices will not be extreme.
I'm pretty sure it's because they're cutting the (govt-owned/operated) airports in on the action.
Usually local government-owned. That shouldn’t be a factor with the Feds.
I think most investigations of operators on that level are done by state attorneys general.
They can be, but based off the description of events higher up the thread, I could see the Feds getting involved if this is accurate.
If you buy up all the retail space in one airport, I don't imagine that triggers interstate commerce law that would allow the feds to step in.
Why wouldn't it? All but the smallest airports have an effect on interstate commerce 6 virtue of flights going to other states.
I was pleasantly shocked to find a 7-11 in an airport that charged their normal price for coffee.
Certain airports (Salt Lake City, NY metro airports) make a choice to enforce pricing that is representative of outside pricing because the perception of gouging is so bad.
The last time I flew JFK - pre-pandemic, the prices were insane. $16 for a sub sandwich (not Subway). Tasted terrible. I've never been to NYC, so I don't know if this is what they charged outside.
Portland, as another commenter said, tends to have the same price in the airport as their restaurants outside.
Definitely not normal. In most of Manhattan, you can get a quite good sandwich for less $14 or less.
The rest of NYC is going to be cheaper.
Portland (PDX) had really good prices last time I was there. Seatac is OK, they have affordable fast food options and their starbucks is only slightly more expensive than on the outside.
European airports are worse. I never spent so much on a coffee than at Zurich's airport. It was swiss markup over the usual swiss markup.
The Starbucks in airports are usually still franchised (which otherwise is rare for Starbucks), and at least a few I’ve encountered are definitely operated by HMS Host.
Yes, but if you're Starbucks, you'll make an agreement with HMS not to overcharge too much.
It looks bad for you to be a >$100B company and trying to price gouge your loyal customers at the airport.
The McDonald's in Barcelona airport used to have normal prices but recently they've started ripping off too :(
There is no price I would pay to eat Taco Bell before boarding a flight though.
I don't get this joke. I eat Taco Bell occasionally and it's fine on my gut. I don't order the meat, though. Usually I'm getting a black bean crunch wrap with guac instead of nacho cheese.
I'm with you but it's a common enough sentiment that there's probably something to it, and I recall friends having issues over the years. For these people at best it's painful gas and at worst is [worse], so there is a large group of people who can't digest a particular common Taco Bell ingredient well.
I've seen speculation about undiagnosed lactose intolerance but frankly Taco Bell doesn't use that much cheese on their cheesiest items compared to say, a pizza, which is another very common food in the US and has way more cheese.
I wonder if it's undiagnosed gallbladder issues too.
I haven't had taco bell in a couple of decades, but I used to have issues with the beef shortly after eating there (so probably not bacteria) but no issues with chicken. I suspect my body was not used to the grease, and that taco bell had particularly greasy beef.
Taco bell plays nice for me.
On the other hand, last time I took my family to Chipotle, my kid had liquid poo for 2 weeks with onset a couple hours after eating there. We have never been back since. That place scares the you know what out of me.
You're in a lot more danger of GI infection from fresh produce as in the Chipotle condiments than you are from highly processed, standardized, frozen & reheated fast food.
I’ve never seen a Taco Bell in an airport. But Seattle SeaTac has a McDonald’s and its prices are pretty reasonable compared to other Seattle McDonald’s. Actually, at airport is about the only time we eat at McDonald’s these days.
I noted that the most expensive Taco Bell in the DC/MD/VA region is the one inside of Union Station near the Amtrak terminal.
They’re not crazy in terms of the cost structure, it’s like the $20 hot dogs in a billion dollar stadium that is half funded by taxes and half funded by loans/bonds.
Someone has to pay back the loans and/or bonds plus interest… or a lot of someones chipping in with their hot dogs, tickets, drinks, etc...
I am surprised I have not heard about more kinds of surge pricing or other price increases to exploit consumers. For example, raise the prices across the board $1 for an hour before the adjacent stadium opens.
Do the Franchises put limits on the pricing power of individual stores?
Wendy's recent plan to implement surge pricing in all of their stores faced a lot of public blowback. Consumers hate that kind of price gouging.
Fast food is probably one of the least popular areas to have dynamic pricing because a huge part of the value prop is consistency.
I was thinking more local franchise owners who might not be getting the same scrutiny as corporate. Especially if you can tap into transient audiences who are unlikely to bring repeat business anyway.
I live up the hill from this one and spent >$70 on a few items last Friday for my gf. Insane price for satiation and eventual butt mud.
Get a bidet, they're awesome.
It’s only a matter of time before someone creates a Taco Bell dynamic pricing engine / realpage like price fixing service. I’m sure it’s already here considering most of these Taco Bell’s are owned by private equity groups.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1234412431/wendys-dynamic-sur...
It does not look like any of the prices have been updated since 2023.
I've begrudgingly eaten there after a night out at Ozzie's. Such is life.
Is it? I lived at Zella right next to here for years and just thought the prices of Taco Bell had skyrocketed since I was a kid.
How expensive is it?
Yeah, I used to live down the street from that Taco Bell. Two 3 soft taco combo meals and cinnamon twists was like $40 before I moved.
It was nuts.