Pricing the items based on the specific customer is sketchy. A franchise working with a franchisee on the most profitable pricing model is what they are supposed to do. At best this is either a nothing burger of an article, at worst it hides the fact that some places are tracking customers and adjusting prices per person. Which is shit.

How do I manipulate it to lowball

I don't buy McDonal's because the price/value equation is off. Whether it is off because they think I'm rich or because they think I'm addicted doesn't really matter. The result is that I just don't buy.
But if I was a regular customer, I would see unstable prices as a negative because it means, I have to research current prices first before going there. That's inconvenient. I prefer reasonable and stable prices.

Maybe, McDonald's introduces haggling next so customers can feel like they are buying a used car when they buy a burger...

Not that I needed another reason to avoid McDonald's. Tastes nice, but the burgers have become tiny, and their food gives me the shits.

Been 5 years since I ate my last Mc Crap. Not going back ever.

When I'm bored, I get price quotes from Lyft and Uber to the airport. I'll click around and look at the different tiers of service. Then I choose not to actually request a fare, and close the app.

I fly enough to where both apps probably have me as a regular airport customer, but that I'm price sensitive enough where I just won't use their service sometimes.

I do the same with Doordash and other food apps, where I just put together potential orders to get a sense of how much something would cost if I ordered it, and then just never order it, letting that cart expire. I'm hoping this poisons their data or adds something to the price sensitivity metrics.

I also look at airfares, hotel prices, etc., a lot. It's not for the purpose of manipulating their algorithms, as I just like to get a sense for how prices move over time. But if there's a side effect that these variable pricing algorithms take into account people who window shop and walk away, maybe I'm helping push prices down.

If they're gonna create a panopticon, we should fuck with their data.

The bargain with fast food was that it was shitty for you, but it was quick, cheap, and tasted good. Now it’s even WORSE for you, costs as much as an actual meal, and increasingly tastes like garbage. What exactly are people trading off now?

There should be quotes around "burgers" in this headline as well IMO.

Why is it still referred to as a burger; it's a product, get it right.

even stores in the same city can have different cost amounts for the same exact items

That has been a thing for years.

A local guy did the legwork pre-covid to price check a list of items at every McD's in the city and found that there was a significant difference in price across the city.

The patterns he found were that franchisees were generally consistent across their own locations, and that the locations in the more affluent parts of the city tended to be more expensive.

The only real surprise was that corporate didn't mandate exact prices across an entire market area.

How about McFuck Yourself

On the plus side, surveillance pricing legislation has already been introduced in (IIRC) four states just this year, and if I had to guess, we could eventually see state-level bans in at least half of the states.

This, like the electronic tags at Walmart, or Uber charging more when your phone battery is low, or Target mining your loyalty club data to surge price you, is something that they're speedrunning to try and normalize before the law catches up.

Don't worry they will soon be instituting klarma so you can amortize your Big Mac into a 6 month payment plan.

Isn't this going to hurt them more than it helps them? The whole point of places like McDonald's is I know that no matter what location I go to I will get the same food at the same price.

If I don't know in advance how much a meal is going to cost I might as well just go to a local business since the quality will be better.

Then they came for the accountants.

To be clear the dynamic pricing isn't the problem in this story, they did that before AI. It becomes a problem when they use surveillance to change prices per person rather than per store.

Normally my knee jerk reaction would be against this. But if it helps to drive McDonalds to lose customers in the long run, well…🤔