One afternoon last week I ate a Wendy’s hamburger for the first time in probably a decade. Well, I ate some of a Wendy’s burger. A couple of bites into my triple with cheese, I realized that I must have arrived during a shift change, because the patties tasted at least hours old – if not weeks. My wife’s dog loves chewing on shoes, so I gave the cute K-9 terrorist the sandwich.

I wouldn’t have thought any more about my failed walk down fast-food memory lane if I hadn’t ran across a news story the next day: Wendy’s to close 300 stores in late 2025.

According to the company, Wendy’s “Project Fresh” initiative is aimed at revitalizing the brand by closing underperforming stores and renovating outdated facilities. The company pledges to achieve greater efficiency and reallocate resources to drive profitable growth, the usual buzzwords companies mention when things aren’t going well and they’re closing a few hundred stores. Before worrying about greater efficiencies or architectural refreshes, my recommendation would be a Project Fresh for the actual hamburger patty.

One strength of a franchised chain restaurant is consistency. A Dairy Queen Blizzard is the same in Knoxville as it is in Sheboygan. But this consistency also presents a threat: while consistency is wonderful when customers love your product, it becomes a liability when they don’t.

This dynamic is especially true near the bottom of the restaurant food chain, where fast food outlets not only face increased competition from new upstarts, but they also find themselves competing with mid-market restaurants that have been forced (or chosen) to price compete for budget-conscious diners. Twenty years ago, if you wanted a fast, inexpensive burger, your primary choices were the Big Three: McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy’s. In addition to relatively new and growing chains like Cook Out, Five Guys, and Whataburger, casual dining restaurants like Applebee’s, Bob Evans and Chili’s now offer value-priced burgers-to-go for folks willing to spend a couple of extra dollars and minutes to get something better than a patty that tastes like someone cooked it during the morning shift then reheated it at dinner.

The restaurant business is tough. Very tough. You’re selling a low-priced, low-margin product to customers who vanish the moment someone else offers a slight improvement in taste or price. Wendy’s can close stores, remodel dining rooms, and issue press releases about efficiencies, but operational cuts are not a real solution for a lousy product. Eventually you have to make something that people actually want to eat, or at least something my wife’s dog wouldn’t treat as a chew toy.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.