I'm currently standing in line in Madison Square Park to get food from Shake Shack. Shake Shack is a small walk-up restaurant in New York that serves excellent burgers and shakes. It's extremely popular and, consequently, the lines for it often resemble those for the finer E-ticket rides at Disneyland.
This gave me a thought. Many fast food chains, most notably Ben and Jerry's, will often have promotional days where they give away free product. These days are, of course, accompanied by extremely long lines, because TANSTAAFL. Many economics blogs have run commentaries on this phenomenon (I believe Freakonomics did; I'll try to add a link later). I wonder if Shake Shack would be willing to run their own equivalent of this promotion: have a day where they charge $20-$30 for a burger, so you don't have to wait in line.
Like I said in the subject, economists would like the idea. I suspect no one else would, though.
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I don't know how an economist would analyze the situation, but the harm to regular customers would be a practical concern. The casual regular customer would show up and be disappointed at not finding his hamburger at the regular price. The next day, he'd be uncertain about whether he could get the old price and might not go by at all. He might even be angry at the "gouging" that he remembered from yesterday. If I were the business owner, I'd be very afraid that in the long run I'd lose business.
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