Wendy's to close hundreds of US stores in bid to halt falling profit
Wendy's to close hundreds of US stores in bid to halt falling profit
apnews.com
Wendy's to close hundreds of US stores in bid to halt falling profit
Comments
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Wendy's was a big part of my coming of age days..1$ double stacks sustained me during my senior year in HS...These days their food is shitty and overpriced.
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I ended up at one this weekend and was taken aback by the prices.
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So, comparable to everyone else in their "food genre"
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Yes...
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Yeah, we used to do the $4.20 meal. Four items off the dollar menu plus tax was $4.20, usually JBC, nugs, fries, frosted. Paired great with a joint. Many, many trips back in those days.
NJ changed their state tax, and thus ruined the $4.20 meal.
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With how expensive fast food is now, you might as well just go to a slightly more expensive place and get a higher quality burger or whatever.
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I used to love Wendy's and went to Wendy's a little while ago and just got a burger no fries nothing else and it was like 9 dollars. I was blown away and never want to go back. All these cheap chains jacked up their prices and saw temporary profits but then customers realize it's not a good deal and stop going. Late stage capitalism really sucks.
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Of all the fast food restaurants, I still go to Wendy's like once a year. And you aren't kidding. The 4 by 4 shrunk, and before, it was $4, but now $7.
The one-use app coupons brought it back down. But f that noise.
It's still cheaper than the average lunch in my city, where meals cost $12-15.
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A lot of sit down restaurants are about the same quality as fast food used to be and twice as expensive. It's just not worth it to eat out
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That hasnt been my experience at all. If I go somewhere for 2x the cost of fast-food, the quality is usually far ahead
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Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer ... or whatever...
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Wendys has the best deal on a meal that I know of, if you are really hurting. You can get the $6 bag which is about 800 calories plus drinks. You could technically survive on $7 a day there if you drink a few drinks while there.
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Sir, this was a Wendy's.
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Now it’s a weed shop.
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Not for long!
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Was looking for this comment. Was not disappointed.
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The better of the national fast food chains imo. At least they used to be.
Fast food is supposed to be cheap. No reason to eat at these places anymore.
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To be fair, ingredients have continued to climb in price, especially beef. The fast food model was always unsustainable without sacrificing quality even further and raising prices.
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Fast food likely would have been fine… if wages increased as much as the prices did.
The fact that the minimum wage doesn’t increase every year, yet prices do, meant that this was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
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Im not so sure.
Apparently the current CEO is only worth about 6mil. Fast food isn't like Tesla or twitter so no billionaires I guess. Idk. How much upper management is there, what's their salary and how actually valuable is there work? It's just fast food. What about wall Street investors, how much do they get. How much is wasted on ads? Lots of supply chains in fast food too.
I just think when it comes to food there shouldn't be any extreme wealth and profit. No megayachts, mansions, or Bentleys. I don't see why the quality can't be good, workers can't be paid much better, and the prices can't be cheaper. In our capitalist system some people are getting way more money that they did not earn and don't deserve, at everyone else's expense. But I admit I don't know the numbers and 6mil for a CEO seems low (although I'd retire immediately with 6mil LOL).
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The fast food model was always unsustainable without sacrificing quality even further and raising prices.
Not true. The people making 6 or 7 figures could all take a hit to their salaries and that would translate to lower prices for customers.
The problem is, why would they if they don't have to?
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shrinkflationed to hell, and people generally stopped eating there when there are better options.
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In the late 80s and early 90s, Wendy's was the best for dumpster diving. You could get a basketball-sized sphere of ground meat out of the trash around 2-3am. Peel off the outside inch or so, and you'd have meat for days.
Dominoes dumpsters were another source of awesomeness back then. It was a very different time.
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There's a Wendy's by me, a few summers ago in the drive thru lane cockroaches would just climb on your car, windshield, it was nasty as hell. This happened twice and I told a friend about it, and he's like "Oh you mean the roach Wendy's." Sigh. I was coming down off meth binges so I didn't really care, just needed enough hot food to pass out.
And that's my pitch for a Wendy's commercial, which hasn't happened yet.
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When I said bring back the 90s I did not mean health and food insecurity!
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But the CEO did receive his yearly 999999 milion dollar bonus, right?
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Of course he will as will the shareholders see record profits. Doesn’t matter if they kill the brand to do so either.
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Wow, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million dollars! No wonder they're not profitable!
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Messed with the fries four times too many.
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Yep their fries are awful
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Their fries are super mid, but always had the better tasting burgers out of the FF chains in my town which balanced it out. Now it's more like I don't want to spend 10.89 on a basic burger only, not even a fucking combo.
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Have they tried enhanced features like dynamic pricing and day-part offerings, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling?
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Them suggesting dynamic pricing is why I stopped going there. ...Well that, and because for the prices they are already charging, I can simply get better quality food.
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They were the first to suggest dynamic pricing. It was received poorly.
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Don't give 'em ideas to drive it into the ground even faster! I didn't GAF about the corporate jackasses, but plenty of low income people need their jobs - especially with what's coming soon after all the fuckery Trump has been subjecting the country's economy to.
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I used to love Wendy's! Then one day they shrunk the patty/tomato/lettuce they put on the JBC to the point where the thing is like 80% bun and I was done with them.
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OK, I've seen this episode before. Which Private Equity is it?
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They merged with Arby's in 2008, so none.
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They're publicly traded but still have a high stock ownership by private equity. Arby's is directly owned by private equity.
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McDonald's owned a large number of it's locations prior to the real estate boom. As a consequence, they were more aptly described as a real estate management than food services business model by the late '00s.
A lot of their relative success has come from avoiding the crippling rent increases other fast food vendors have had to endure.
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I’m guessing it’s really to extract shareholder wealth and then declare bankruptcy once everything has trickled up
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I'll guess something with "equity" or "capital" in its name is behind it.
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Look at the prices of your salads and then deal with that! They were good salads (before out of the blue you halved the size as if we wouldn't notice). You even upped the four-for-four without adding anything.
Wendy's brought this on itself
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Over the last ten years or so, every US restaurant got it in their head that salads should cost the same as every other meal on the menu. When I can make seven salads at home for less than the price of one at a restaurant, I'm simply going to make salads at home.
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I fucking love the summer salad. I can't afford it, so I've only had it like twice, but it is delicious. I don't get how a pile of leaves can cost more than $10
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Have they tried not having shit food?
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Wendy's used to be good, but all the ones around me are not well run at all. Burger King is the same way.
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Wendy's uses prison slave labor
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More details please!
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The slavery part is because prisons use prisoners as slave labor with no rights to organize or unionize, negotiate wage or benefits or hours, etc. they are used for some of the most physically demanding and dangerous jobs or 'leased' to private businesses like equipment. Prisons, especially for profit anti human shitholes, use the 13th amendment as legal cover to abuse and oppress the people they are charged to protect and care for.
The Wendy's part has two points: agriculture and to a lesser frequency staff at restaurants
Here's a pretty thorough article including a history, mentions Wendy's on page 10 with a link. It references a survey from 2016 where 76% of prisoner respondents reported they were threatened if they did not work.
https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2622&context=nyls_law_review
And a document including specific issues with Wendy's and their corporate response
https://www.iccr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Wendys-2025-Exempt-Solicitation-FINAL-1.pdf
AP also ran a multi year investigation that showed how multiple major corporations including Wendy's use prison slave labor while lying about supply chain ethics, but I don't have a link to their detailed reporting just summaries
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Good. The quality is laughable and the price is horrendous. I used to love Wendy's. In the last 10 years they've managed to become the worst fast food chain around
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I noticed the same. I was all about Wendy's back in the day. Then the good mobile deals left, the quality dropped, they changed their nugget recipe so it sucks ass and I can't even eat the spicy nuggs anymore. Dave would be upset by the drop in quality.
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Those MOFO's forgot to put MEAT on my hamburger like 7 years ago. Never went back. Place is always empty as it should be.
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One time I ordered a plain cheeseburger and received a bun with lettuce tomato and mayonnaise and no patty or cheese. That was sadly not the last time I went to Wendy's but I don't recall it ever being good since then. That was maybe ten years ago and I haven't been back in 6 or more.
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You could have gone back the same time and got a free burger!
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If they close them ALL they will save big time.
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"Sir, this is a Wendy's" "Where you you think we are right now?"
dramatic music
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I liked their old flat square burgers, dammit. Anyways, I knew they were in trouble when I saw Wendy's branded chili in cans and Wendy's branded burger patties at the grocery store.
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Yeah I never understood why they came out with a canned chili. The worst part is it's like $2 more expensive per can than most of the other brands. I've never tried it because of that. I haven't seen the branded burger patties yet though.
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perhaps make quality food with quality ingredients instead of making diarrhea sandwhiches
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Remember that buffet?
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They removed my favorite sandwich, the grilled chicken, from the menu. It had the best macros out of all fast food chains too :'(
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Reduce revenue (instead of addressing the store issues) to raise profits. Got it.
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One thing I liked about Wendy's is that the chain uses/used real vegetables on its burgers. Even the cheapest burger on the menu (the deluxe) has a real slice of tomato, an actual leaf or few of green lettuce, and a couple of rings of onion.
Of the places I've eaten at in recent history, they've all clearly dropped in quality and increased in price to varying degrees. However, I'm surprised to see people say things like Wendy's is the worst fast food chain because that doesn't exactly align with my experience at all. And for the record, I'm not saying it's great food, either, just that it's not the worst by far. Obviously it's a very subjective measure and there's lots of variation from location to location or even between regions and it also probably depends on the types of things you'd typically order.
To me, the worst offender of all the ones I've been to in the South and Midwest USA is Taco Bell, by far. At least for the things I would typically order, the price has gone up the most while the size and quality has gone down the most. While the service is sometimes good and sometimes bad, the food itself is consistently terrible seemingly regardless of location. No, it was never good food, but it's definitely gone from meh to yuck.
All that aside, Wendy's doesn't exactly strike me as the type of restaurant where closing stores makes the remaining ones more appealing. For that to work, it seems like the current stores would have to be too densely placed (i.e. Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks and a Starbucks in the store next to that Starbucks) OR the food would need to be good enough to actually motivate people to drive further away for it. Honestly, I know it's not the latter, and from my experience, there are fewer Wendy's than most other fast food chains, so it seems like the former wouldn't apply either.
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They recently switched to shredded lettuce, and their chicken is now inedible.
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I stopped going to Wendy's maybe over a decade ago when they switched from clean, classic fries to fries with potato peel & extra dirt flavor. Marketers will advertise potato peel & dirt as premium value, and dumbass Americans will pay extra to eat it up.
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Interesting, in Canada they never changed from the clean cut.
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I went to a Wendy’s last year. They just opened one near me so I figured why not. They wanted me to put my order in on a touch screen. I walked out. If you can’t employ people to take my order I won’t visit your establishment.
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Touch screens are actually pretty great imo. You can see all the options they have (and not just what they put on the menu screens for that day/week/season), see any extra options you can do (like Taco Bell has a "grilled" option for their burritos), customize it exactly how you want it, and best of all you can take your sweet-ass time.
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Yeah, I go to the kiosk every time. Saves me a conversation and I can get real granular with it.
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I generally don't mind ordering on a touchscreen, but every time I've attempted it at a Wendy's in the last year (multiple locations in different towns) I had to go to the desk because something wasn't working
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A spicy chicken sandwich in the solarium was so good.
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I learned a new word. I've never heard it called anything other than a "sun room"
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Does this mean that people will finally stop posting that stupid "sir, this is a Wendy's" line?
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They probably will as soon as the concept the meme is pushing dies.
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we can replace it with the saints row parody alternative Freckle removed's.
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In the post image, is her collar supposed to subtly say "Mom"?
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Yeah, always has. It's one of those hidden symbols in corporate logos, like the arrow in the FedEx logo between the E and the x.
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MUCH more subtle than the FedEx one. Been seeing the Wendy's logo for decades without noticing it until now.
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You know when the US is in trouble when burger store is closing
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Wow its like meatpacking monopolies have consequences.
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Wendys, if you stopped reheating your burgers so they'd taste better, maybe you wouldn't have to close so many stores.
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Change your fucking FRIES already! I love Wendy's hamburgers but I also like french fries and I will skip you and go to the MCDS right across the street. Not to mention the MCDS app let's me get crazy cheap deals on meals all month long. I can use the deal every day of the month. Another large chain that fell asleep at the wheel of complacency.
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Must be a regional difference or something, because I recently had Wendy's and was impressed with how good their fries have gotten. Crispy and flavorful.
Meanwhile I haven't had a bite or sip of anything from McDonald's that wasn't absolute shit in like 20 years. I never loved McDonald's (I'm big on texture), but at least they used to have the best fries and sodas. Then they removed the beef tallow from the fries, making them the actual worst fast food fries available, and they replaced their soda fountains with Freestyle soda cloacas.
I already wasn't eating their meat because I like meat to be chewable, so that reduced the number of items I'll order from McDonald's to zero.
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Good. Fuck Wendy's. Worst food poisoning I have ever had.
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I'm trying to imagine a world where all fast food went out of business.
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This is all because of the bad service they gave me back in 1997. Screw them!
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I actually enjoy eating at Wendy's. But the Wendy's half a block from me is so bad on service that I finally swore off going there. They never get my order right they act incense when I ask them to do the slightest little thing that involves customer service. Their pricing is incorrect because they don't update their menu to reflect what they're trying to charge you. Their chillis fucking amazing but I'm sad that I can't go there and enjoy it because the services just so fucking bad.
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I was just kidding.
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I mean, I would probably still eat there if they didn't rid of their side salads. But yeah, I didn't want fries, I want chicken and lettuce!
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This is a shame. Wendy's was good but the service is getting worse and the food more expensive.
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Interesting. A brand new one just opened near me within the past month.
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You near Calimesa? Cause they opened one there recently as well, drive thru is fucken wide because it's an old bank.
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I honestly think their spicy chicken sandwich with a mix of the new honey mustard and ranch is god tier fast food.
Is there a list of the closures?
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I'm pretty partial to the baconators myself.
God, even that name sounds like it'd clog your arteries just saying it out loud.
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When is the last time they had a new menu item or an ad campaign. Someone is shooting for a fire sale. Our local Wendy's closed down and is being replace with a Taco Bell.
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I often rely on fast food when I'm away from home. I sometimes check Wendy's if one is nearby, but pass on it every time because their vegan options are completely abysmal. It pains me to say, but one cannot live on potatoes alone.
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They seem to be doing well in Canada? I don't know within the past couple years I've noticed more and more Wendy's opening up in Toronto.
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Their food about killed me so good riddance
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There’s a Wendy’s opened in my town. In the UK. I was quite surprised
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(The video gets a bit more interesting around 3:18)
This is why I stopped ordering from them.
Explains why they haven't updated the menu since forever. Conservatives fear anything new.
Explains why the whole chain is dogshit. Dining areas closed, drinks give you diabetes, chicken is fried to death, nuggets are stale, burgers have forever chemicals in them, cookies are the wrong flavor. Literally everything is designed to be crap.
Also, they have Palantir AI tangled in their management and running the supply chain.
The same company that is trying to make the entire world a surveillance state, and are giddy about their AI being used to kill military targets.
A couple months ago I went to a Wendy's and AI took my order.
That was the last time I went to a Wendy's.
It’s completely on brand though.
CEO: I want to have state of the art AI-enabled surveillance on all aspects of our business. No vertical, no horizontal, no customer, will escape the gaze of our panopticon!
VP: Sir, this is Wendy's.
I stopped ordering from them because they pay their employees garbage wages and expect them to perform like they're being paid at a king's ransom.
Case in point the Wendy's near me was running with two people for over half a year. This was long after the pandemic by the way.
Where does one get this analysis?
This is an app called "Goods Unite Us" on Android. I think they have a site and iPhone app too.
Same I love me some Wendy's chicken nuggets and sandwich. A frosty once in a while is nice. Even enjoyed some of their breakfast stuff they added a few years back. Not a damn cent since Trump 2024/figured out they repub donors. Eat shit. Love driving by and seeing the Wendy's empty as fuck.
Good to know, thanks.
I stopped ordering because the food is shit, but now I'll never give them another chance
so they did this to themselves. nice.
What a shame, I kinda liked their burgers back when meat didn't make me kinda nauseous.
I stopped ordering from them because of the heartburn and reflux. I stopped meeting friends there because of their morals. And I'll mock them endlessly for sponsoring their own destruction.
I hope that the employees from all these Wendy's (nutsonyourchin, I'm sorry!) land jobs at Costco and that local restaurants succeed at establishing roots in the ashes of this cursed company.
Damn now I have to add it to the list with Steak and Shake
This is good to know. Now I have more ammo to never go there again. I will miss their spicy chicken sando tho, it's my favorite of the fastfood chicken sandos, but that's a small price to pay.
That Wendy is kind of a removed wow
Go woke go broke lmfao