NY governor signs law making the restaurant reservation black market illegal

https://ny.eater.com/2024/12/18/24324546/restaurant-reservation-black-market-illegal-passing-hochul

by pseudolus • 2 years ago

56 66 2 years ago

ny.eater.com

Spooky232• 2 years ago

We have shady middlemen profiteering off of everything. Why is this a bridge too far?

aomix• 2 years ago

This is just a highly visible problem. Bots make getting reservations at popular restaurants impossible for normal people. So they aren't necessarily being priced out they're being excluded by not being in the know. Which is frustrating. I'm in the know, thanks to my wife, and we still sometimes need to try for weeks to get a reservation because we refuse to pay on the black market.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

Couldn’t restaurants have required an up front non refundable deposit and required the name of the person eating at the time of making the reservation?

Airlines/rental cars/hotels have solved this problem without legislation.

nradov4• 2 years ago

Life pro tip: if you don't have a reservation then just slip the Applebee's hostess $5 and you can get a table.

in-pursuit• 2 years ago

It was probably hurting tourism.

ternnoburn• 2 years ago

The inverse of your question is "why not do this elsewhere too?"

passwordoops• 2 years ago

Because these middlemen don't lead to record highs for investors

yongjik• 2 years ago

You have to start somewhere.

immibis• 2 years ago

There's not a chance this will be extended to things like airline tickets and healthcare. It starts and ends at restaurant bookings...

Trasmatta• 2 years ago

"Why fix anything if there are still other things broken"

WalterBright7• 2 years ago

Nothing shady about it. It's called "arbitrage".

throw109202• 2 years ago

Who are you responding to? Your comment is directly attached to the story post.

donatj• 2 years ago

This seems like vastly unnecessary legislation to me. There are far more important issues to worry over, but some politician failed to get a reservation and decided "there aught to be a law".

Ormus• 2 years ago

Spoken like someone who doesn't live in NYC

stonogo• 2 years ago

Or someone who has no idea how legislation works. The idea that all the "more important issues" take the same amount of time and effort to tackle is invalid; this is an achievable goal and one relatively easy to gather consensus.

The flipside complaint would have been "why are we waiting so long to fix this simple thing." Government can't win.

nradov4• 2 years ago

First world problems. People who live in NYC should quit expecting government to solve every minor inconvenience for them and just go eat at another restaurant. Lots of good restaurants in NYC, and many don't even require reservations.

bitlax2• 2 years ago

If you can't afford your dinner reservation maybe you shouldn't live in NYC, right?

happytoexplain3• 2 years ago

The "less legislation" mindset is fundamentally flawed in the US. Most people who espouse it do so because good societies ostensibly don't have tons of legislation. But legislation is a symptom, not the problem. If this legislation isn't present in other countries, it's because they don't have this problem.

kortilla3• 2 years ago

You’re saying “less legislation” in more words.

Blackthorn• 2 years ago

We're capable of caring about more than one thing at a time.

summerlight2• 2 years ago

When you write something like that, you probably want to add what are "far more important issues to worry over" and why pursuing this legislation would cause delay on that issues. And just in case you're not aware of, "far more important issues to worry over" is usually much harder and more complex to gather consensus across stakeholders and passing this kind of minor legislations doesn't really have any impacts or delay there. This is more of "spare time" stuff.

nradov4• 2 years ago

This is not an actual problem that needs to be solved in the first place. It's a total waste of tax dollars.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

Headlines like “I made $70K selling NYC restaurant reservations — and I don’t even live in New York” have become all the more common as the savvy implement bots to (or manually work to) book up several reservations at a time, only to be sold in what’s being referred to as a “black market.”

From the linked article:

At Ralph Lauren’s posh Polo Bar, tables have been gulped up by an Ivy League, undergrad math wiz named Alex Eisler. The sophomore at Brown University has made it a business to create phony numbers and emails to snag reservations — and resell them for a healthy profit.

So how is New York going to prosecute people like Eisler? I doubt Rhode Island is going to extradite them. What if someone in Canada does the same thing?

onionisafruit2• 2 years ago

Is it’s a felony, Rhode Island is required to extradite. I skimmed the article and I’m not sure if this will be a felony though.

Your point stands for international actors.

alwa• 2 years ago

Are people normally extradited in civil matters? With the penalty being a fine of up to $1000 per violation, plus options for customers to sue individually, wouldn’t it work like any other civil matter?

Get a judgment in NY with or without the defendant choosing to show up, come after their assets, that kind of thing? Even if they’re Canadian, presumably they’re accepting money in dollars somewhere along the line, couldn’t a motivated attorney come after that cash flow?

https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S9365

neilv• 2 years ago

The bill does not target legitimate trading platforms like the members-only Dorsia [...]

At least they had fun with the name. (Presumably named after the unobtainable reservation craved by the protagonist in "American Psycho".)

loloquwowndueo• 2 years ago

lol doh aren’t black markets illegal by definition?

WalterBright7• 2 years ago

The government should stay out of the free market. There's nothing wrong with a market for a scarce commodity.

But I wonder why the restaurants themselves don't sell the reservations. They're leaving cash on the table!

Nifty3929• 2 years ago

What is missed here is that this will create zero additional seats, it just changes the dynamic of how you get one.

There might have been an after-market for these reservations where you could buy one if you want to. But now what? I guess it's just a race to call the restaurant? Or to reload their reservations page over and over again on the day they open them for the day you want? If I want to eat a Fancy Restaurant, but they are normally fully booked - what do I do now?

The folks that resell reservations like this are addressing an actual problem in the market. Perhaps you do not like that they are earning money doing so, but preventing it doesn't fix the problem either.

Retric• 2 years ago

By taking up reservations that they may not sell, they make the problem worse and obscure what’s going on while costing restaurants business.

By extracting money from customers they people off of fine dining, which makes running restaurants harder.

Not a lot but every 0.1% matters in such a competitive industry.

WalterBright7• 2 years ago

I thought the way people got reservations was to pay the concierge.

One way or another, you're going to have to pay to get a reservation at a hot restaurant.

It's like under communism, where the price of bread was set by the state. The result was shortages. So the real "price" a customer would pay was how long they were willing to wait in line. Customers would then pay other people to stand in line for them.

It's not possible for government to legislate away the price.

nradov4• 2 years ago

What you do now is go eat at a different restaurant. Lots of good ones out there. I can't understand why any customer would be stupid enough to put up with that much hassle and expense just to eat at one particular popular restaurant.

And if you really like a restaurant enough to eat there all the time and become friendly with the staff then you can always get a reservation.

volkl48• 2 years ago

To be a blunt as possible here: Then you don't get to go.

I recognize that the particular demographic that this board attracts probably doesn't like that answer. But among the general public, I'd say it's an extremely popular answer - and "addressing a problem in the market" this way looks like yet another way to make society unfair and biased to the rich, and the average person absolutely hates it. Which is why this law will have broad popular support.

bitlax2• 2 years ago

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about fancy restaurants here.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

Why doesn’t someone create some kind of app that lets people use their own bots to grab reservations?

Footnote7341• 2 years ago

Scalping is good and there is no such thing as a distorted price.

NY governor signs law making the restaurant reservation black market illegal

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