Is Wendy's lying to you to keep its prices down?
Perhaps not everything on the menu is fresh, including the new hot and crispy fries.
And then, of course, there's the chili.
We've got all the cost-cutting secrets coming up!
Lower prices incentivize consumers to buy more.
Think of it this way: You won't stop at a gourmet restaurant every day if you're keeping
to a strict budget, but spending a couple of bucks on a burger and fries once a day
doesn't seem awful.
It's a fairly affordable luxury, and you can get a lot more $2 burgers than $20 steaks.
As long as the restaurant makes more than the cost of the burger, the system works.
Even low profit margins translate to big profits when customers buy enough.
Wendy's doesn't need you to pay $20 for a burger once a month if you buy 10 cheaper
burgers over four weeks.
It's all about the scale.
To be fair, Wendy's doesn't offer a dollar menu anymore, but their value meals and menu
items follow the same principle.
If you can convince a lot of people to buy a lot of a cheap product, nibbles of profit
turn into a full meal.
The potato is a humble, yet beloved vegetable.
It's also about as cheap as the dirt it grows in when bought in bulk.
A farm may lose a contract with a fast food company if someone else sells their potatoes
for a penny or two less per pound.
This contributes to why fries are ridiculously cheap to make, and we all know how popular
they are.
Don't you feel like you're missing out if you buy a burger and skip the fries?
These golden children of the deep fryer have a huge profit margin.
Fast food fries cost very little to make, and they often sell for more than some of
the cheapest burgers on the menu.
The Jr. Cheeseburger costs 99 cents at most locations.
So do the value-sized fries.
A Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger sells for $1.99, and a medium fry will cost the same.
Beef, bacon, and cheese all cost much more than their equivalent weight in potato, and
french fries take less time and effort to prepare than a burger.
"We love these fries.
They're really good."
Combo meals like the Biggie Bags sound cheap because they come with a lot of different
items.
Apart from the sandwich, though, the items are all incredibly inexpensive to make, so
it's a cheap lunch for you and a payday for Wendy's.
If you really want four small portions of four different foods, then Wendy's bargain
combo meals are still a good investment for the experience.
That said, it's important to remember how they make their money while still selling
you the goods for fairly cheap.
The sizes are often smaller than you realize.
The 4 for $4 deal, for example, includes not small, but junior fries.
They are literally smaller than small.
The drink is actually small, and you get four whole chicken nuggets with your sandwich.
Remember the golden rule of restaurants, which is that soft drinks have a huge profit margin,
even when sold for less than the a la carte price.
The Biggie Bag costs a dollar more than the 4 for $4 deal and delivers extra meat on your
sandwich along with a small fry.
You may get more food, but Wendy's profits more from that extra dollar than you may realize.
It's still a bargain meal, but it has major benefits for Wendy's too.
The average hourly rate for a Wendy's employee is under $10 per hour, according to PayScale.
While managing positions bring home bigger paychecks, few earn over $15 an hour.
Plus, there are fewer managers compared to cashiers and cooks.
Labor is part of business costs, and the price of labor goes into the price of your burger.
These wages aren't accidental, and they're built into Wendy's operating methodology.
It's such an issue that rising wages and staffing shortages have inspired the company to invest
in labor-saving alternatives.
Investors Business Daily says in 2016 the company announced a trial run of self-service
kiosks for ordering in-store, which would free the workers to focus on preparing food
instead of serving as cashiers.
It could also open the door to cutting back minimum staffing requirements.
Essentially, Wendy's makes cheap food through cheap labor, and that cheap labor is so important
to their business model that they're paying for new technology to counteract rising labor costs.
Leftovers are great.
The week after a major holiday is like living reruns of a fantastic dinner.
Maybe your parents even used leftovers to make other dishes.
After all, leftovers are the heart and soul of the American casserole.
We've all had them, and if you enjoy Wendy's chili, you may like leftovers even more than
you realized.
It turns out that this item has an untold truth all its own.
"Great chili!"
Wendy's leans into this tradition by using leftover burger meat to make their chili.
This information has been confirmed by multiple former employees who volunteered to discuss
their old jobs on Reddit.
Burgers that don't sell are chopped and frozen so that they can be added to chili later on.
So if the whole idea of meat that's fresh and never frozen is what attracts you to the
restaurant, you should understand the chili is an exception to the rule.
But, of course, the chili is a lot cheaper than it would be if they used fresh meat.
If you visit Wendy's often, you know the truth: They aren't always cheap.
A premium sandwich can cost over $6 on its own, easily.
The deals keep rolling through, though, and no one can resist the idea of a bargain.
But what happens once the sale has ended?
Wendy's has great limited time deals, like their special offer for a honey butter chicken
breakfast sandwich for just $1.99.
At one point, they offered some breakfast sandwiches for just $1 each, and you can sometimes
snag any size fry for $1, too.
While no deal lasts forever, there's always another discount on the horizon.
"We call it Wendy's super value menu.
Everything is at a special low price."
These sales don't just save you money — they help boost Wendy's revenue.
First, the bargain convinces you to stop at Wendy's and make an initial purchase.
If you like what you eat, you may go multiple times to take advantage of the offer, and
you probably aren't going to buy a lonely $1 fry without another item to keep it company.
When the deal ends, do you refuse to eat Wendy's breakfast sandwiches ever again?
Doubtful.
You tried it because it was cheap, and if you liked it, you'll probably splurge on it
again at a later date for a higher rate.
We know the beef isn't frozen before it goes on a sandwich.
But Wendy's doesn't make all of its food from scratch, despite the pretty pictures of fresh
ingredients in their ads.
The lemonade, for instance, is not a fresh-squeezed brew put together from whole fruit in each
restaurant's kitchen.
A Tik Tok user filmed the actual process, and the only potential fruit was in the puree
added for the strawberry variation.
According to the video, employees add Hubert's lemonade base mix to a literal bucket of tap
water, stir it up, and add flavored syrups to individual cups for additional flavor options.
You may have tried a powdered lemonade mix with tap water at home.
It isn't dangerous or unsanitary, but you should understand that one of the reasons
Wendy's is cheaper than a local, boutique restaurant that makes its lemonade from scratch
is that, well, Wendy's takes the pre-packaged path.
Most of your soft drink is water, and the syrup and carbonation come cheap.
It's a well-known fact that restaurant soda costs the customer far more than it costs
the restaurant to provide, which makes the drink menu a boon for any Wendy's.
You may not realize a small soda costs more than the cheapest cheeseburger, either.
That gives other products that cost more to make — like a burger — a little wiggle room.
Because if the customer buys a drink with their cheap burger, Wendy's still wins.
Even more importantly, the consistent profit margin of soft drinks supports all those bargains
that Wendy's is so well-known for.
It's part of Loss Leader Strategy, which draws customers away from competitors with a cheaper
version of a product.
In short, the value menu woos the frugal customers, and the marked-up soft drinks make the money.
The in-store counter may be the smiling face of Wendy's, but its lifeblood pumps through
the drive-thru.
Speed and volume is the key to profit in the fast food industry, and if you've ever been
stuck in a slow drive-thru, you instinctively know it isn't functioning the way it should.
These lanes are for speed, and when the team inside is equipped to do their jobs well,
they bring the money flying through the order window.
The same principles that govern cheap burgers work here, too.
Drive-thrus help keep food cheap by increasing sales by volume.
A lot of cheap food sold with a low profit margin can make big bucks when you sell enough of it.
The same principle lowers the pressure on individual customers to shell out, because
someone ahead or behind the bargain shopper will choose premium items.
It's so important to their business model, they're considering drive-thru-only locations.
The big selling point for Wendy's new hot and crispy fries is that they're a better
product for the consumer.
It isn't a big deal for restaurants to release food that tastes better for their customers,
but there's some particular wording you should note.
These fries aren't just hotter and crispier fresh out of the fryer.
They are designed to stay hot and crispy for 30 minutes.
"You want fries with that?"
This is a strange brag for a company that likes to talk about how fresh all of its food is.
How does this make Wendy's food cheaper?
The new fries could potentially cut down how many they have to throw away.
It's a strategy that aims to work around the fact that fries may not be terribly fresh.
If they taste better longer, they have more time to wait.
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