This week, it seemed a real clanger dropped; Wendy’s announced it would experiment with “dynamic pricing” in 2025.
Yes, Wendy’s — the fucking fast food restaurant — was going to introduce surge pricing, short for making its products more expensive at peak times. The internet went wild. I went nuts and started writing this post. Fortunately (or unfortunately for me), that wasn’t quite what Wendy’s meant. There is to be no surge pricing after all.
Ah heck. Well, I’ve started writing, so I’ll proceed with my rant as planned.
It was striking that the idea of fast food restaurants trying to tech-ify their pricing is seemingly so aligned with the current landscape that we all bought it without question. We have become so accustomed to companies and corporations and big tech treating us like garbage, time and time again, that we just think, “Here we go again” when the next serving of shit comes along.
It’s sad. It’s sadder, too, that had Wendy’s started price gouging, people would have still eaten there and signaled to the rest of the industry that they would put up with it, who would have soon followed suit.
At the heart of the matter is the biggest shift that has come with the rise of big tech. Customers and the value provided to those customers are no longer a priority.
The be-all and end-all of every business decision, every pivot, every paywall, every product, every price raise, every hire and fire spree are no longer about customer value.
It’s about shareholder value.
A history of enshittification
In truth, it’s been like this for a while. I think back to the IOT (Internet of Things) days when physical hardware products were stuffed with all kinds of smart tech, not because it improved products (in most cases, it made them dumber), but because those companies could shout buzzy phrases, show flashy product demos, and signal to the market that they were “down with the kids.”
We had the rush to put everything on the cloud. Why store data and files how you want to when you can become another number in the subscription model? All because it was the flashy business model that drove stock prices at the time.
We’ve had countless pivots to the Blockchain, not because “put it on the blockchain” made anyone’s product more valuable to customers, but because it made the product more valuable to investors. We’ve seen brands releasing dumb NFTs and trying to push them onto unknowing customers as high-value when, again, they were absolute garbage in terms of customer value.
A killer example is the Metaverse, specifically Meta, a huge, potentially defining pivot to a new frontier in tech. Except… it wasn’t done because Facebook’s Meta’s user base demanded it. No, Zuckerberg thought he saw the writing on the wall for social media and, with it, the sinking of his stock price, and played a hail mary, one which he is slowly backing away from in pursuit of the next one — A.I.
On that subject, we now have A.I.-stuffing, where braindead management types scrawl “add A.I.” on the ‘new ideas’ whiteboard, not because their products would benefit from such capabilities, but because it’s a marketing ploy that will likely result in a little share price bump.
Even in media, it’s going the same way. Google has announced it will essentially pay publishers to produce A.I. slop. Once-huge media outlets like Sports Illustrated are all in, trying to sneakily produce shitty A.I. content hidden under A.I. created profiles, hoping — or assuming — you won’t notice or care. Vice recently fired most employees and is moving from a writing model to transition to a “studio model.” Customer value? No thanks; let’s pump out the next article on whatever ChatGPT tells us is cool, and let’s drive that share price up by cutting all our staff!
The example that makes most angry is ads on streaming platforms and the nerve of these companies to continually raise prices while offering a worse and worse experience. Streaming is a subscription model, and the whole fucking point of subscription models is that we pay to go ad-free. Now, users are caught paying too much for too many services that now fill their programs with ads, just like cable did (remember, the very thing streaming “disrupted.”) This full-circle moment perfectly illustrates the continued move to please anyone but customers.
There are so many examples everywhere: products and companies pivoting to either chase high shareholder valuations or keep that line ticking up. And in most cases, we as the consumer have eaten this shit up, allowing the cycle to continue again and again, and it’s lining the pockets of the few while leading to the destruction of customer value for the many. Sure, iPhones are cool, but our consumerism has given birth to trillion-dollar companies with incomprehensible wealth and political and economic power. Who does that benefit, customers or shareholders?
Now, let’s see how long before a fast food chain really does implement surge pricing.
You’ve been warned.
On the Trend Mill this week
Apple ends “Project Titan” — After employing hundreds of people and burning billions of dollars, Apple has abandoned its decade-long fanciful pursuit of building a fully autonomous car with absolutely nothing to show for it. Many of the team, known as the Special Projects Group, will be moved into a new division to focus on… drum roll, please… Artificial Intelligence. As if we needed to drive home the point of this newsletter anymore; autonomous cars out. A.I. in.
Put a ring on it — The next wave of wearable tech is on this way, this time in the form of a smart ring. This week, Samsung announced that the Galaxy Ring will be released this year, giving you the option to wear a ring that talks to your watch that talks to your phone. While it doesn’t look comfy, at least it’s discreet and not overly obnoxious, and if we discount that you need a screen to view the data, it’s a screen-less piece of hardware. This one might do okay.
Netflix to raise prices AGAIN — Speaking of decreasing customer value, the streaming service announced that more prices raises are coming to “accerlate revenue and earnings growth.” At this point, it’s becoming unsustainable; how high do they think they can push prices before a backlash? IMO, that time should be now. Same shit, now with ads, but more money. I’m hoping it pushes us all back to the Torrent age. That was a good time.