Diners don’t like overcrowded restaurants or long waiting lists, but there’s one approach to the problem they like even less: surge pricing. Also known as dynamic pricing, it attempts to ease the biggest rushes by either raising prices at the busiest times, lowering prices at the slowest times, or both.
While the latter, aka early bird specials, are having a moment, the prospect of charging more at busy times tends to trigger consumers. After Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner announced during a February earnings call that the chain would “begin testing…dynamic pricing” in 2025, the chain faced backlash and said it would not be charging more at busy times and that Tanner’s announcement had been “misconstrued.”
When a chain of pubs in the UK announced in 2023 it would charge more for pints during busier hours, we polled Retail Brew readers on whether they thought that was a good strategy; nearly 3 out of 4 (73.9%) said no, it was not.
But why use a stick when you buy carrots in bulk? So goes the thinking at Snooze Eatery, a chain of breakfast and brunch restaurants with 71 locations in the US.
Table stakes: “Our Saturdays and Sundays, we typically run a longer wait, and there’s just more interest in having—especially a brunch experience—on a weekend,” Adam Porter, director of digital media at Snooze, told Retail Brew.
Snooze launched a loyalty program in 2022 that awards participants 100 points per dollar spent. But it awards 50% more—150 points—to those who visit on Monday through Thursday. The program is powered by Punchh, which designs restaurant loyalty and marketing software.
While Snooze is still championing the program two years later, Snooze CMO Andrew Jaffe explained that with other promotional offers to boost weekday traffic, including a weekday all-day happy hour and $10 menu—burp—it’s impossible to isolate how much the bonus loyalty program itself has helped boost weekdays.
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It’s “a little bit harder for us to really nail down which specific promotion drove it,” Jaffe told Retail Brew.
But what Snooze does know is that the loyalty program that includes the weekday bonus is effective overall, with members visiting the restaurant an average of 1.5 times more per year than non-members.
“That might not seem like a lot, but our brand has an average yearly visitation from a guest of three visits,” Porter said.
Points of departure: OpenTable, the reservation platform, has its own loyalty program, and markets an option to restaurants where they can increase the points OpenTable awards by as many as 10 times to incentivize diners who choose particular days, times, or meals.
Restaurants that use the incentive for the first time see an average increase of 10% in the number of meals they serve for the time they’re promoting, according to OpenTable.
Snooze, meanwhile, also is rewarding loyalty points for reasons beyond the transactional, a trend known as “emotional loyalty,” with surfwear brand Rip Curl being a memorable example for awarding points for every wave surfers catch.
Thanks to an integration between Punchh and Yelp Waitlist, Snooze keeps track of all the time its loyalty members spend waiting for tables, and awards them with a commensurate yearly bonus for their patience that they weren’t expecting.
It’s “a unique thing to our program that our guests have no clue is happening that’s just a surprise and a thank you,” Porter said.