Kaylee Wells

Meal deals make sense at a classic drive-thru because those customers are looking for cheap, fast food.

Rich Schenck, vice president of innovation at the food service industry analysis firm Technomic, says the fast casual restaurant traditionally didn't advertise cheap food.

It advertised food that was higher quality.

But then there was inflation and rising prices on groceries and utilities and housing taking bigger bites out of our wallets.

Now Panera might pull some customers from traditional drive-thrus, but their $10 value meal can't compete with the price of the $5 value meal at McDonald's.

But that's not the point.

Professor Alex Suskin teaches food and beverage management at Cornell University.

He says this is about helping customers who always came to Panera but are having a tougher time affording it now that paychecks are getting stretched by all the other rising prices.

In other words, off the $10 value meal and back into that $14 sweet spot.

But getting customers to walk back in the door is only half the battle.

Stephen Zagor, who teaches food entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School, says there are two more factors to Panera's success.

And two, the cheaper food only works if the food tastes good.

Zagor called this value pricing a war, which means Panera won't be the last to try it out.

He expects other fast casual restaurants, think Chipotle or Panda Express, to start doing the same thing.

I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

Video games used to be a real boom or bust industry, a lot like Hollywood.

But instead of everyone rushing to go see Wicked, we'd all rush to buy the newest PlayStation or Nintendo gaming system and wait for months or years for the next installment of Zelda or Star Wars or Madden.

Those booms still happen.

Dimitri Williams is a communications professor at USC.

He says there was a boom when the Nintendo Switch 2 came out last June, for example.