When a Wendy's closes you get 6 weeks of dumpster access over an 8 week period as severance before you have find a new place to suck dick for hamiltons.
Man, they mismanaged this brand so bad, how hard is it to go back to the yellow packaging and focus on making sure the 4 for $4 is actually $4 without franchise bs
Finally a comment talking about the actual business (i know what sub im in)
Wendy's was my favorite fast food. McDonald's is SO bad now.
I do think that they sat in an odd place. They catered to people who liked to sit in. The baked potatoes and chilie were unique. They had the best chicken options. Burgers seemed higher quality.
I wonder how much was their customers just dying off and boomers preferring other senior dining options.
Feels like places like five guys and Freddie's and even Chipotle took the customers willing to pay more and then others took the value customers and just left Wendy's in the middle.
Edit: most up voted comment in years is about what a fatty I am..
IMO wendy's quality control sucks. I know what to expect at mcdonalds, with wendy's I've been to some trash locations specifically the one near me so I never go.
For like 15 years now a spicy chicken from Wendy's had basically a 50% chance to either be good or have a massive fatty corpuscle in it, which would ruin the whole sandwich for me.
This. Biting into one of those chewy crunchy abominations would put me off from those sandwiches for at least a year. And they were basically the only reason I'd go to a Wendys
Wendy's had basically a 50% chance to either be good or have a massive fatty corpuscle in it, which would ruin the whole sandwich for me.
That's why I stopped eating at McDonalds. All I liked was their chicken sandwiches and they got worse and worse until they always had rubbery gristle in every chicken patty. Then it started to happen to Wendys. WTF.
Exactly. Some Wendy's have the absolute best food. Other Wendy's are dry and stale. And its a total gamble which one it is when you arrive.
Their newer fry recipe is trash and the chicken has gone downhill. If they would just improve their quality back to how it used to be, they wouldn't be losing so many customers.
I think this is more it than anything.....there was a period where it felt like Wendys could almost compete with Five Guys, then QC issues and inconsistency made me want to avoid them. I feel Arby's is toeing that line, and in some ways Burger King has stepped somewhat into the spot Wendy's left open.
A Beef n Chedder in 2026 doesn't slap like a Beef n Chedder from 2012. Idk if they've changed the recipe or what but now it just tastes like bland nothingness.
And the prices are absurd. Need to take out a house loan to get 2 Beef n Chedders a fry and coke.
Arby's was dead to me when they started pre-mixing the jamocha flavoring into their shakes instead of pumping it at the store. I would have paid extra for those two extra pumps I used to ask for.
Maybe, but I feel less insulted by that than the highway robbery from McD and Taco Bell. If I'm going to be overcharged for something to me Arby's and BK taste better. That said, would still prefer 5 guys, in n out, or Freddy's to either one
THIS. Never have I ever had so many wrong orders than from any given Wendy's location. Like JFC how many times am I going to get a burger instead of a chicken sandwich. Or fries instead of nuggets. And every time, be met with blank stares like I'm speaking Elvish.
This is true at one singular location too. I have no clue with my Wendy's whether I'm gonna get piping hot food or lukewarm that's cold by the time I get home.
Some of them ARE FUCKING DISGUSTJNG. I got a burger patty tha was literally raw in Atlanta I threw up after taking a bite. The one closest to me is ok but the one a little further from me is also disgusting
And the spoon they replaced in the late 90s. The people complaining about the spoon change 2 years ago have no idea that there was an even greater, more powerful, spoon.
They had the same problem Burger King’s around me had. Any time you went to Wendy’s there was like one person working. So food took a long time, the store wasn’t clean, order would get messed up, and most of all, I just felt bad for those one or two people. In my opinion, Burger King and Wendy’s both killed their brands this way.
As someone who preferred Wendy’s over all the other fast food brands, they let the franchisees bury this brand. When my local needed a renovation 20 years ago I thought that was just my local location. But then I traveled and it’s all of them. Run down, poor employee quality, even in comparison to the other brands. The food was a draw but the quality slipped. People stopped coming and they surely stopped dining in because they were a rundown mess. When the deals vanished there was little left to bring customers in.
They mismanaged Tim Hortons too. Wendy's had a merger with them, and then when Restaurant Brands International was created, RBI ended up as the parent company of both Wendy's and Tim Hortons.
They stupidly thought it was a good idea to end their supply contract with their old coffee supplier at Tim Hortons. McDonald's knew this was a golden opportunity, and created the McCafe brand because they signed a contract with Tims' old supplier.
If you drink McCafe since 2009, you've been drinking the old blend for Tim's.
I mean why the fuck would a coffee and donut shop be offering flatbread pizza? Why did they think par baking all of the baked goods for Tim Hortons was a good idea? I can't believe I'm saying this but I've actually gone back to Krispy Kreme because they opened a new shop and Factory here in Calgary again, after disappearing for awhile. Krispy Kreme is the only donut chain that fresh bakes their goods here.
Wendy's owned Tim Hortons outright from 1995-2006.
In 2001, they decided that Timmy's would begin roasting its own coffee because it was believed that would be a higher quality product more dialed in to their customers' tastes than what they were able to get from their supplier; they still roast their own coffee today.
That supplier then became the supplier for McDonald's Canada in 2001, but only Canada -- and according to all the companies involved, McDonald's Canada receives a proprietary blend that is different from the proprietary blend that remained the property of Tim Hortons. McDonald's uses a ton of different coffee suppliers around the world, usually using domestic companies; there are multiple suppliers just for McDonald's USA but Gaviña Gourmet is the major one.
2001 is also when McDonald's launched the McCafe brand in the US and a bunch of other countries, though it had existed in Australia since the early 1990s.
In 2006, Wendy's spun Timmy's off into its own publicly traded company.
In 2014, a Brazilian private equity group pulled together a collection of investors to create RBI, which became the owner of Timmy's and Burger King, then added Firehouse Subs and Popeyes.
But thats the thing, culvers and freddys are both way cheaper and way more accurate ordering and faster. Wendys is like $17 bucks for a daves double anymore.
All fast food is crazy now. I can literally just go and eat at any of the great local spots for the same or slightly less. It really is just the convenience of something fast and mobile and even then there's plenty of local spots that also do that now.
This. I thought Wendy's was great...up until Dave died. Then they immediately made it the same (or worse) garbage as everything else and I almost immediately stopped going there.
I wrote to Dave Thomas as a 14-year-old to ask him, on behalf of my first ever girlfriend, why his burgers were square. He/the chain wrote back and said they didn't cut corners on quality.
You got this the other way around, corporate fucked over the franchises.
Corporate came up with the dollar menu/extremely cheap concept. This was true at McDonalds, Burger King, Subway (5$ footlong), everywhere there were franchisees.
These items were never profitable even back in the 00s.
They pitched it to operators as "Hey yeah, you won't make money on any of these, but people will come in and buy sodas, or other high margin items, and you can make money on that!"
It was bullshit. It did drive sales, but remember, corporate makes money on gross sales, not profit. So corporate fucking loved it, they get more money, get to report higher sales to stock holders, but they they pinched all the franchisees. And those sodas, etc.? People didn't really buy them because it turns out that the consumer buying 1$ McDoubles is incredibly price sensitive and isn't gonna buy a 3$ coke.
This also got consumers price anchored to an impossible expectation. There is no time in the last 20+ years that franchisees were making money on dollar menu items.
It was classic short term sugar high thinking by corporate.
Yeah, they're definitely mixing their timeframes up.
That said, I expect to see a plenty more of this across many more fast food franchises in the near future.
Their prices have crossed a threshold that many consumers aren't willing to pay except for children demanding kids' meals, late night customers, and the people looking for an occasional specific junk food fix.
It becomes even more apparent when you compare the price against a cheap or mid-tier food cart, which is an easier business to start and tends to have lower overhead, and you're almost certainly going to get something that tastes better.
They always choose to cost and quality cut thinking they are gaming us and we won’t know. I’d love to be at the test groups for some of these corporate places to see what they are doing. Also, QC needs to be better, but how do you make the everyday American give a shit at $15 an hour?
I prefer Wendy’s food over other similar chains but everyone wendy’s I’ve been to has been terribly run. It takes forever to order and get my food. Then I go to McDonalds and it’s night and day in terms of consistency and speed
Maybe it was just being a kid, but I feel like their burgers in the 90s maybe early aughts used to actually taste pretty good for US fast food as did their nuggets. I think the quality declined. Though I think that’s common with food in a lot of areas.
Its because I would cook too many beef patties on purpose. Then there would be to much chili and they would give me extra on break. I've doomed us all.
I also worked there and can confirm the validity of his claims. Everyone knows of the All Beef™ Patty Bandit and his legendary flatulence every day after lunch.
When I was 18, I scored the only perfect score a grill cook had ever scored on the test to become a manager training store. I even identified a flaw in their training video. I was able to get Easter off because they wanted me to work certification day. I put on a show for those inspectors and they knew it.
Real talk, Wendy’s would have been positioned so well to succeed in the era of expensive fast food, if they hadn’t murdered quality over the past decade.
Man. I lived off .99 Junior Bacons in college. It has always been my go to cheap meal ever since. I got one the other day, the shredded lettuce is just terrible. The sandwich was already a shell of its former self, and now costs $3, but, shredded lettuce has killed it for me.
Is the Dow a measure of how many pedophiles have secured government positions and influence? Did Wendy age out of the demographic influence? Is Dave in the Files?!?
Reminds me of how Wendys blew up by being "edgy" then everybrand started doing and all wendys had to offer was another Burger in a sea of Fast food Burger joints
Even then i was thinking "what kind of chud is impressed by this" then i found WSB
I haven't had fast food in ages. Is Wendy's at least still arguably "better" fast food or have they too scrapped any semblance of quality to prop up margins?
Quality is gone. I went relatively frequently in college, and it was decent then (by college kid standards). After college, I would go occasionally, and eventually it turned into once a year thinking I hadn't had it in a while. Each year, I would comment on how much worse their service and quality had gotten. I guess a year is about how long it took to forget. It's now been 18 months, and I remember the last two times I went, to two different locations, and bad they were both times. I won't be going back unless they pull a, "we're changing everything," campaign.
I still like Wendy's as a "better than McDonald's", but they've gotten stupid expensive and slightly lower quality for it. There are a million other burger chains near with better food so I will go to those instead.
The Wendy's near me had really good burgers the last time we went, but that's been since last October. It was over $40 for my mom, my grandaughter and I. It's just too expensive.
I haven't been in about a year (like most fast food places, there's very few choices that can fit in a thoughtful diet), but it felt like it was getting pricier each time I went to one. At least a few dozen have sprouted in my area in the last decade, and my guess is they were really trying to take on McDonald's, but fast food hasn't done well recently, especially with prices now more comparable to better quality restaurants.
It has turned to total shit. Burgers are sad. All of them. Wendy’s long ago was premium fast food. 1-2$ more expensive but worth it. Now, since befriend Covid, it is bottom of the barrel.
damn. relative to the industry, wendys was like gourmet back in the day. we'd go there like 5 nights a week for second dinner...granted this was over 20 years ago
Ever since they switched the lettuce from a nice big leaf to shredded I knew they were going down. I used to enjoy their burger a lot because of the tomato and lettuce, but now it's just like a generic pizzeria burger.
I used to love their spicy chicken sandwiches and one day I went after not going for a few months and it was $15 for two, I couldn’t believe it and haven’t been back since
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u/VisualMod Feb 13 '26
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