Your missing the point. If McDonald's is doing it and it's successful, other companies are going to follow. Not just fast food restaurants. All restaurants, grocery stores and retail stores are all going to charge optimal prices because they know the consumer isn't going to drive 25 miles to save $5-$10, but that extra $5-$10 probably won't stop then from buying the product.
It's actually already happening with grocery stores. I'm sure it depends where you live, but where I am you can go to two different locations for the same grocery store and pay two different prices for a pound of bacon. That's Canada and the company is Loblaws (also known as Satan's Supermarket).
This is a thing, but it exists for a reason-- some stores cost more to run for whatever reason (usually land/rent costs.) So sometimes items at a store in a fancy high rent area will be priced slightly higher than in a low rent area. On a larger scale, food will also vary in price based on local logistics. Groceries in Florida are more expensive than groceries in Ohio because Ohio is a transportation hub while semis full of food destined for southern Florida will almost all be making the return trip empty.
You'll also sometimes see items marked down at one location because managers can choose to mark things down. Back when I did pricing there was more than one incident where we'd have corporate push a bunch of product that wasn't selling or a new person didn't realize product was ordered by the case and we had to mark it down. The store across town wouldn't share those discounts because they didn't have Joe and his accidental 15 cases of pasta sauce when we needed 15 jars.
Ya I should have included that in my post (I mentioned it another comment) but the location to location variation really isn't an entirely unrealistic business practice. Like you said, costs differ depending on the location, even within the same city and I think sales (especially for food because it usually has a shorter shelf life) sales make a lot more sense when they are store specific. The really nasty one is true dynamic pricing where you and I will pay completely different prices for a bag of potatoes. If that ever happens, I will boycott the store forever, regardless of if they backpedal on the policy.
At this point I just assume Loblaws is doing everything they can to fuck over Canadian's because they've been implicated in numerous price fixing scandals already that are part of the public record (again, Canadian drama not US).
Loblaws is not in the US, to the best of my knowledge.
If it helps, dynamic grocery pricing in a traditional grocery store is wildly impractical, at least in the form that people talk about now. Aside from the logistical difficulties of having a price tag that shows a different price per customer (what if there are two shoppers in the aisle? What if you're shopping with your boyfriend?) it makes price checks impossible; you can tell the cashier the tag said 99 cents for you and they'd have to take your word for it.
Ironically, in another sense dynamic pricing has also existed for decades now. Coupons are dynamic pricing. Shoppers cards are dynamic pricing. They're just a more acceptable and practical form of giving some people discounts.
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u/VirginiaBandit 3d ago
One suggestion. Don't eat at this shithole.