McDonald's advertised Big Mac prices by "customer willingness to pay," sued eight days later for the same sentence
Two documents, eight days apart, and the work today is laying one against the other.
September 29: the company was pushing AI tools that suggest Big Mac prices based on "customer willingness to pay."
October 7: the company is sued over an AI tool that recommends dynamic pricing for its U.S. franchises.
Set them side by side. "Suggest" and "recommends" are the same verb in different coats, so that is not where the daylight is. The daylight is in the nouns. The pitch calls it customer willingness to pay, which is the trade term translated into plain English. The company did the translating itself. Eight days later the translation is the thing it has to answer for.
A menu board carries one number per item. That is the whole technology of a menu board. A willingness-to-pay number is a different instrument. It is not a measure of the beef, the bun, the labor, the rent or the freight. It is an estimate of the customer. When the estimate goes up, the price goes up, and the sandwich is unchanged.
Which brings us to the complaint that arrived before the lawsuit did. The franchisees — the owners, the people who signed for the fryers — said the algorithm widened the gap between prices on identical items at various restaurants within the same neighborhoods. Identical items. So the widening gap is not a fact about the sandwich. It is a fact about the machine's estimate of who walks through each door. Nobody on the wire has put a dollar figure on that gap, and I would like one. Until somebody files it, the measurement on the record is that the owners could see it from inside their own stores.
Eight days is a short reconciliation period. In the ordinary run of these things, a pricing practice reaches a courtroom after somebody spends a year or two establishing that the practice exists.
The customer in line is not party to either document. The number goes up on the board and they pay it or they leave, and an estimate of whether they will leave is part of the instrument.
They tell you the price is what the sandwich costs. The company's own phrase says the price is an estimate of you, hon, and that phrase is now sitting in a lawsuit with its name on it.