Has the King begun a reign of terror?
A customer at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike thinks she caught Burger King using dynamic pricing red-handed — all after the fast food company mocked the concept earlier this year.
“The price of my Burger King meal got more expensive as I was checking out,” Reddit user Simply827 recently flagged in a viral post.
A photo of her tablet transaction showed the order total jump from $33.89 to $34.18 — the only explanation on the screen offered was that “pricing can change for a variety of reasons.”
“It wasn’t added tax. The previous total had tax included,” the disgruntled diner added in a comment.
But, pouring salt in an open wound, Burger King whoppered Wendy’s last winter when their rival disastrously flirted with a surge-pricing model.
“We don’t believe in charging people more when they’re hungry,” BK posted on X at the time.
Now, months later, the restaurant chain is facing an online fast-food fight in the wake of the Garden State grievance.
“That Cancel Order button looks real tempting,” one Reddit reader commented, with another adding, “Must be surge pricing. I’m done with fast food. They forgot their place.”
“Fast food places have become a joke,” someone chimed in.
“This should be illegal and at least considered false advertising,” added a third.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson dismissed the idea of dynamic pricing at Burger King.
“I can confirm there are absolutely no plans for dynamic pricing at BK, and that no BK U.S. locations are using or testing dynamic or surge pricing,” the statement read. “As our president said in February when our competitor announced exploring surge pricing, ‘As the leader of this company, I will never support surge pricing or charging people more when they’re hungry.’
“What happened at the New Jersey location was the result of a sync error with kiosks, and we are working with our software vendor to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the statement concluded.
However, a TikTokker who said he is a decade-long software engineer wasn’t biting.
“This isn’t a bug. Somebody went to the trouble of implementing this on their system,” he claimed in a reaction video to the incident.
After explaining his detailed theory about what happened, the clip maker suggested that someone or something accidentally spilled the beans on a plan for Burger King to have it their way with customers’ wallets.
“Basically, what Burger King is trying to say was, ‘Oops, this, this isn’t a thing, this is a bug.’ And what I’m trying to say is that, no, it just made it into production sooner than they really wanted it to.
“The only way that this kind of stuff goes away is if you say, ‘No,’” he lamented.
