Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant-reservations-in-sf/

by RonileSille13 • 13 years ago

166 159 13 years ago

diogomonica.com

sien2• 13 years ago

This is remarkable.

Concert tickets are also being bought this way by bots for scalpers.

Ebay sniper bots are commonly used.

High Frequency trading is the high end this.

Perhaps it is unavoidable, perhaps other means for selling things online should be sought out, text messages with semantic replies required or something?

fsckin• 13 years ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

On the topic of scalpers, Louis CK apparently hired [0] scalpers to help build some anti-scalper checks (I assume it is similar to fraud detection rules: multiple purchases from the same IP, out of town billing addresses) that runs on his website where he now sells all of his tickets. If you get flagged by a rule, the ticket goes to will-call, so you have to show ID and the credit card at the event. That small step to prevent it significantly reduces the resale value for a scalper who can't attend the event.

Here's the interesting part: It worked! Roughly 25% of all tickets for major shows fall into the hands of scalpers. On Louis CK's last tour, of all 125k+ tickets he sold, than than 1% were scalped. [1]

What's really terrible about the whole scalping business is that it would be solved, but only by the people who care least: The venue has a perverse incentive allowing scalpers to buy every last ticket they can get their greedy little hands on. As long as a ticket gets sold, they don't care. Screw the fans.

Possibly NSFW language in these links. [0] http://www.wbur.org/npr/162514765/louis-c-k [1] http://boingboing.net/2012/07/06/louis-cks-direct-sales-conc...

thaumasiotes2• 13 years ago

The venue has a perverse incentive allowing scalpers to buy every last ticket they can get their greedy little hands on. As long as a ticket gets sold, they don't care. Screw the fans.

Everything I've seen trying to explain the scalping phenomenon appeals to the idea that this is completely backwards from true. Specifically, the theory is that the venue's incentive is to fill seats, which is why tickets are so dramatically underpriced (price too low -> shortage of seats -> all seats get filled -> the act appears to be popular). From the venue's perspective, a seat sold to a scalper is a seat they lose money on and that might not be filled during the performance (since the scalper's incentive is to charge a realistic price), which is a double loss to the venue.

In sum, selling tickets to scalpers gets the venues an amount of money they don't want (they were guaranteed to sell out anyway), in order to generate an effect they don't want (some seats will be empty during the performance). Where's the perverse incentive?

TeMPOraL2• 13 years ago

That's why I stopped buying things via auctions and stick only to "buy now" solutions. Sniper bots combined with friends bumping up prices on auctions means that a typical auction is a waste of money (price bumped up) and time (you can't win with 10 sniper bots aiming for the very millisecond the auction ends).

Yeah, playfield got leveled because now everybody and their dog can use snipers (hey, where's the reward for technical competence?). So the "game" looks similar to before automation, but is more complicated. A positive feedback loop of increasing complexity if you like. For me, "the only winning move is not to play". </rant>

onebaddude• 13 years ago

Sniper bots combined with friends bumping up prices on auctions means that a typical auction is a waste of money

This doesn't make sense, really. You enter the price you're willing to pay in an auction; what everyone else bids is irrelevant to you.

If you are getting outbid, it's because someone is willing to spend more money on the item, bot or not. Don't bid low trying to get a deal. Bid what you are willing to pay, and it works every time. It's a very efficient system.

qq662• 13 years ago

The "solution" to sniping is only in eBay's hands; either sealed-bid auctions (which they effectively are today) or a policy of extending the auction one hour past the last bid.

namdnay7• 13 years ago

I really don't get the outrage against scalpers. They're just buying commodity futures, taking a bet on the future value of the tickets. If the value goes up, they make a profit, if the band suddenly become unpopular or whatever they lose.

We're in a capitalist system, the price you pay the scalpers is the "real" price of the concert: it's the law of supply-and-demand.

Now, if scalpers win every time, this is an issue with the original ticket sellers, not the scalpers!

If Shell started selling petrol at half standard price and some guy comes round to fill up a tank and then sell it to people at 95% standard price, that's Shell's mistake, not evil behaviour on his part.

mgkimsal• 13 years ago

To the average fan, the comparison between a ticket to see Act X on a specific date in their town is nowhere near the same as pork bellies or orange juice. They're called 'commodities' because they're interchangeable. Tickets are extremely specific to a single date and location and act.

njharman• 13 years ago

They are creating monopolies (cartels) and creating artificial demand by cornering the market. Things most capitalist systems regulate/limit.

They are speculators. People have instinctive dislike for speculators as they produce nothing and in scalpers case provide no benefit (such as liquidity) to society.

sien2• 13 years ago

The outrage at scalpers relates to how people feel what something is 'worth' against what you pay for it.

The existence of scalpers is curious. Artists could get the money they do. There are reasons why they still exist, one of them being that artists use scalpers to get cash in hand.

There is a really good episode of Planet Money that looks at why there are scalpers, how they work and what can be done by artists if they don't want them to make money:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...

rndmize• 13 years ago

Soon - "Auction Sniper now supports urbanspoon! First 3 reservations are free!"

There's something frustrating about reading this. Perhaps its that a technological advancement that was supposed to make life easier is being capitalized on by a small group of technically competent people, shutting out the average user.

I was thinking of going to PAX next year a few hours ago and decided to do a bit of research. For this year, the 4 day tickets apparently sold out in 23 minutes, and the rest within 5 hours. I'm having a hard time imagining how its going to be possible for anyone to get some this coming year without a bot.

seanlinmt• 13 years ago

One could always use a Captcha to stop bots if it became a problem.

paolomaffei• 13 years ago

A service that solves captcha for you can cost as low as $2/1000 captcha

avalaunch2• 13 years ago

But it's not a problem for the places taking the reservations. They're thrilled whenever they manage to book solid. It's only a problem for the non technically minded people looking for reservations.

ultrasaurus• 13 years ago

Where I work (PagerDuty), we follow up with everyone who cancels -- my favourite was "I only signed up to be alerted by a script as soon as PAX tickets went on sale" He got them.

asperous2• 13 years ago

There's probably a whole market of "notify me when (plane tickets get cheap, apartments look good, tickets go on sale, etc)"

spellboots• 13 years ago

Yes, in todays technological society, people who understand technology have advantages. I don't see why that is surprising, given the website you're commenting on.

Ultimately this is not about technology, it's about economics. Surely the restaurant should raise their prices until not enough people want to book 2 months in advance to make bots and make this an issue. Or PAX should raise their prices so they don't sell out in 23 minutes but still sell all their tickets before the show. Or either business should increase their capacity. Or perhaps they are capitalising on the fact that they are oversubscribed as some kind of marketing device. Either way, any time there is a limited supply of something people are going to figure out ways to get some, and if the limited supply is available on the web, people who understand the web will have an advantage.

BurritoAlPastor• 13 years ago

"Just raise the price" is an appropriate response to demand for a commodity, but it's an inappropriate response to these scenarios.

For example: PAX is trying to build a community event. The target demographic is not "wealthy people who love games", it's "people who love games" Changing the price results in a different convention.

Similarly, a popular $20 restaurant can't double their prices to keep demand manageable, because a great $20 dinner that costs $40 will reduce the perceived quality of the restaurant.

laumars3• 13 years ago

...or adapt the site so it's not bot friendly instead of raising prices just to punish people.

j_s• 13 years ago

Interesting 20 minute podcast on this topic:

Kid Rock Takes On The Scalpers

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episode-...

Summary

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...

  1) More shows.
  2) Beat the scalpers at their own game.
  3) Go paperless.
  4) Don't sell the first two rows.

PhasmaFelis2• 13 years ago

Funny how the rational, clear-headed solution to economic problems always turns out to be "fuck poor people."

tomkarlo4• 13 years ago

Raising prices is the wrong way to address this behavior. Ultimately the restaurant wants to maximize yield, not just average meal price. Open tables are wasted inventory. So the priority should be to stop bots from grabbing reservations for people who aren't that committed to eating at the restaurant (and thereby stealing them from people who would actually go dine.)

A better solution would be to charge for making a reservation, and give that charge back as a credit against the meal. You don't have to raise prices, you increase the probability that someone making a reservation intends to show up, and when you have a no-show, you get compensated for the empty table (and can still give it to a walk-in.)

Restaurants like State Bird are a bit of a poor example, anyway. Regardless of their reservation book they're going to fill all their tables every night anyway right now, and they don't particularly want larger (5+) parties anyway because they're tiny. I think they want prices low enough that they can establish a loyal clientele that will keep them going once they're no longer the "hot spot" in SF. Or maybe (gasp) they like offering their food to a broader range of customers. Chefs tend to be a little more down-to-earth.

lars512• 13 years ago

Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.

xlevus• 13 years ago

Do restaurant's scale?

Find a bigger venue. Open another store.

Maybe they should just deploy to Heroku or Appengine and have them scale to meet their table needs.

justincormack• 13 years ago

Unfortunately scaling good restaurants is hard. Its a service business not a product business. It can be done to some extent.

epo• 13 years ago

The demand doesn't scale, this is a fashion market where new restaurants are in incredible demand until ... the next hot new restaurant gets it's day in the sun.

chrischen4• 13 years ago

Or open a second location.

eropple3• 13 years ago

Restaurants don't scale linearly.

tome• 13 years ago

Indeed this I do not understand, nor do I understand why bands sell tickets so cheaply when they can be resold by touts outside the door for many times that price.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Kid Rock is tired of scalpers taking tickets away from his biggest fans.

One way to stop that: Raise ticket prices. If Kid Rock charged more for his tickets, scalpers wouldn't be able to sell them at such a big markup.

But Kid Rock doesn't want to raise prices.

"I don't want to break you by coming to see me, " he says. "I want to make as much money as I can, but I don't need to drive around in a tinted down Rolls-Royce or Maybach and hide from people because I felt like I ripped them off."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...

AlisdairO• 13 years ago

Because people aren't generally motivated purely by money? Surely it's not hard to imagine why a band, once they're making enough money, might also want to consider factors like letting in the people who love them the most, regardless of whether they happen to be loaded?

Surely it wouldn't surprise you, for example, if someone accepted a lower salary for a job that they enjoyed more than a better paying job?

chaz• 13 years ago

Or partner with Urbanspoon to charge a reservation fee based on market prices that won't affect menu prices. It's basically a cover charge.

robryan2• 13 years ago

I think a lot of the business is probably generated because they are sold out all the time. Raising pieces threatens that.

Stupendous• 13 years ago

Given their popularity, why doesn't this restaurant just get rid of the reservation system altogether? A lot of the popular/trendy/hipster magnet places here do this since it saves hassle and creates a certain allure when lines are out the door for a table.

Aloisius2• 13 years ago

Given this place has a line outside of it well before it opens on the off chance someone cancels, removing reservations would mean everyone would have to wait for a table.

I can't think of a worse customer experience than taking someone on a date, waiting in a congested line outside at night for 45 minutes only to be told that there are no tables available.

Not getting a reservation on the other hand just means that I can just go somewhere else.

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

Seriously? I thought when most people saw a line at a restaurant, they just went somewhere else.

pyoung4• 13 years ago

Seems like Urbanspoon should be using some sort of scraping counter measures to make things a little more fair. I sent them an e-mail through their contact form (of course I wouldn't be suprised if those are sent straight to the trash/spam folder).

Also, is scraping legal? I would imagine, at the very least, the OP and others are violating the TOS. I have written a few scripts of my own for fun, but I would be careful about bragging about it on a public blog.

pyoung4• 13 years ago

Well, looks like they do actually respond to the contact form, got an e-mail from them a few moments ago saying they were "aware of the situation". Although, looks like this blog has been picked up by some mainstream news outlets, who have been getting comments from Urbanspoon:

http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2013/07/25/are-automate...

hmottestad• 13 years ago

A perfect place to implement a captcha.

thegoleffect• 13 years ago

http://deathbycaptcha.com/

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Or the equivalent of a shadow ban. Once a bot is detected, always return "no reservations available".

zalew2• 13 years ago

This means that I'm bound to compete for reservations at good restaurants with the the hipsters

if this restaurant is so popular, isn't it too mainstream for hipsters? /philosoraptor

bpodgursky• 13 years ago

Please for the love of god keep the shitty memes on reddit.

zalew2• 13 years ago

sorry, forgot to apply the stick up my this morning, so I couldn't appreciate the seriousness of foodie reservations in sf.

beaker52• 13 years ago

Captcha?

pornel• 13 years ago

I'd try:

- detect obvious bots (e.g. clients requesting form without loading CSS or JS or filling it in instantly), suspicious IPs (EC2, VPS hosting) and release smaller batch of seats to them (don't deny completely in case of false positive).

- create waiting list and give reservations randomly to people on the list (while the list can be spammed as well, humans would still have better chance than reserving between 4:00:00 and 4:00:01). Also bot authors would have to be creative to avoid creating easy to spot patterns of names/times in the list.

jbigelow76• 13 years ago

You folks don't actually think that opentable/urban spoon reservation availability is representative of a restaurant's entire table inventory on a given night do you? Pick up a phone (dirty little secret, restaurants segment customers too).

Aloisius2• 13 years ago

Restaurants typically hold back inventory from online reservation systems for two reasons. They either think they can fill seats and they rather not pay the per cover fees OT and UrbanSpoon charge or they want to hold seats for walk-ins. Well three if you count timing seating to keep the front of the house and kitchen from being overloaded.

State Bird Provisions however has so much demand that there is a line for walk-ins hoping for a cancellation an hour before the restaurant opens and they appear to not actually hold back much (any?) inventory specifically for walk-ins.

But generally speaking yes, you will often be able to call a restaurant and get a table or possibly walk in even when their online reservation system shows up as full.

Also, you can also put yourself on a waitlist at many restaurants. If someone calls to cancel, before they release the reservation back to the online system, they'll go through their waitlist and call and ask if you want it instead.

zbowling• 13 years ago

trust me. this man knows his stuff when it comes to reservations. :-)

hi jordan.

tomkarlo4• 13 years ago

From their site: "We welcome walk-ins on a first-come, first-served basis and set aside about a third of our seats for those guests every night, including our chef’s counter and several tables in the dining room. "

grinich• 13 years ago

Or walk in and slip them a $20. It's the old school hack.

theorique2• 13 years ago

also see: be a regular and a good tipper.

(only works in places where you are a regular and a good tipper)

ndr• 13 years ago

You can also nook from the phone a couple of days in advance usually.

namdnay7• 13 years ago

Ah, but then you need the correct phone number...

Bjorkbat• 13 years ago

I bet this bot race is doing a great deal to improve relations between San Francisco's tech population and...well, everyone else in SF.

zaroth• 13 years ago

Since you can't RESELL your reservation, I think the answer is for the restaurant to black list exactly one sniper, maybe just for one year, and publicize doing so.

Everyone else, who has been fighting to get a reservation for months the old fashion way, will not decry your loss.

And I doubt very much you would risk getting blacklisted for sniping reservations off their site, since you appear to love the restaurant so much.

rorrr2• 13 years ago

If you can't resell your reservation, then what's the point of the bots?

dasmoth2• 13 years ago

Some of the bot-herders probably just want to eat there themselves. After all, the author wrote his bot because he wanted a table.

avalaunch2• 13 years ago

What am I missing? Why would the restaurants care? Do they prefer non snipers eating there as opposed to snipers? Won't they just be happy to be booked solid regardless of who the bookings are with? I just don't see how this is a problem for the restaurants at all.

fusiongyro2• 13 years ago

I bet you could cancel a fake reservation one second before making a reservation on behalf of someone else. The effect would be the same as reselling.

Honestly though, I don't understand why this needs to be available over the web in the first place. If your restaurant is that posh, I'm sure you're not going to lose business by making people call in their reservations. You'll still need to have someone answering the phone anyway, so it's not like you're saving money by cutting an employee. Whatever meaningful benefit having an online reservation system might have provided is clearly lost in the absurdity of this situation.

franz12• 13 years ago

Next step: high frequency trading techniques applied to reservation making

pyoung4• 13 years ago

Ahh, that would be hilarious. Urbanspoon should open up a co-location server rack and charge people a monthly fee to set up their servers there.

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

But surely this is a good thing - people will have to take part in an auction for a table.

Want to eat at $POPULARRESTAURANT - you set a bid min and max and off you go.

Its allocating scarce resource at the most efficient level.

fusiongyro2• 13 years ago

It's possible that your patrons are not interested in bidding, or otherwise participating in libertarian economic fetishism.

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

Have you seen people trying to get in for a top NY restaurant - they will participate in any fetishism :-)

tomkarlo4• 13 years ago

You're assuming restaurants look at it as a one-time transaction. But most good owners put a lot of focus on repeat, neighborhood customers, because those are the folks that will come in and dine on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening and help keep you afloat (Friday / Saturday will book out anyway if you're doing ok.) Bourdain said he used to put the interesting specials on weekdays, and save the easy / no-brainer stuff for weekends, partially for this reason.

mozboz• 13 years ago

I'd suggest that this effect is a somewhat superficial expression of the deeply rooted problem of people in urban situations broadly losing their personal connections with their own expressions of creativity and art, primarily through doing work that they are not engaged with in a deep, meaningful sense.

Perhaps:

- People in certain modern, urban situations crave certain types of creative expression that seem to be very hard to find in these environments.

- Social patterns place a high value on being seen to have had an experience, that provide a reward similar to being the artist.

- People capable of producing these artistic experiences are initially perhaps not so interested in managing the people who are the recipients of their creativity - they are more interested in creation.

- Once money and/or fame becomes involved, the artists are unlikely to widely share the skills that lead to the creativity arising, are motivated to protect methods of production, fetishize the product and create strong brands.

These factors together create this 'hipster' effect where small points of creativity are heavily focussed on and take a long time to replicate.

I'd hypothesize that this situation would go away if people were broadly connecting with meaningful, personal creative pursuits. Or, if the artists flipped their model once they smelled success and were motivated to share everything they were doing, allowing the experience to be rapidly replicated.

xentronium• 13 years ago

Wrong thread?

jakozaur• 13 years ago

Few years ago I wrote sth similar for registering to popular courses at my university. A lot of CS students gets an edge doing that.

Moreover, I have also participated in a few lotteries for various things (e.g. Half Dome permit), but did that completely by the book.

A few things that help make system fair (TM):

- price them right, maybe even charge a bit premium for reservation vs. walk-ins

- make cancelation non-free and charge at reservation time, even a few dollars prevents spurious reservations "just in case"

- have a waiting list, if there is a cancellation, you can automatically sell it to someone else

- do some load management, e.g. weekend prices, discounts...

Havoc• 13 years ago

Next week: Co-location

pron• 13 years ago

Priceless! When I studied history I learned how to recognize a significant historical document, and this definitely qualifies as one. I wonder what historians reading this two-hundred years from now would think of our culture.

raarky2• 13 years ago

In London, a "no reservations" system seems to be happening more and more with popular trendy/hip establishments.

And it seems to work.

Places like Burger & Lobster or Meat Liquor usually have very long queues at prime times.

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

Does anybody but the establishment really prefer such a system though? Setting aside time in my evening itinerary for queueing is not my idea of ideal.

Probably only a matter of time until a side-business of people who are willing to wait in lines for you emerges.

bitsweet• 13 years ago

iamexec.com

raarky2• 13 years ago

As a customer it can definitely be annoying to experience at times. My tolerance seems to vary depending on the wait times and food expectations.

A perceived upshot is that the restaurant must put an emphasis on quality at reasonable prices, otherwise they won't draw those crowds and I'm definitely not going to wait for a crappy meal.

However, the "no reservation" method itself seems to help draw crowds too. Kind of like the lines outside a night club seem to draw people. Throw in a bit of edgy branding with some cool marketing and it pulls well - having an "image" works.

Queuing is a bit of a cultural thing/expectation over here. Having someone cut in line can be a huge no no. If someone bought their way into the queue, I could very well see it causing some highly vocal responses. But I'm sure there are people out there trying it out.

Ecio782• 13 years ago

just as information, I use the free service http://www.changedetection.com/ to send me email when webpages change (i.e. jobs opportunities). Unfortunately you can't automate the procedure of logging in and/or posting to searches, and I think the scheduling is once-a-day, so it wouldn't have been very useful for the OP cron case

Eva_Peron• 13 years ago

Cool concept. Wonder if he could write a script to land a reservation at Dorsia. I think that might be asking a bit much, even for a bot.

PhasmaFelis2• 13 years ago

I love how everyone else who fights for reservations is a filthy hipster, while the author is merely a humble gourmand.

joezydeco2• 13 years ago

Great quote from a parallel discussion on Metafilter:

"A hipster is someone who enjoys the things I do, but in ways I disapprove of"

wil421• 13 years ago

The website is unreadable on a mobile device. I can't zoom out.

horacio• 13 years ago

It's a truth universally acknowledged, that a restaurant in possession of a good name, must be in want of a good web designer.

coin• 13 years ago

Site renders horribly on an ipad

btbuildem• 13 years ago

Next step in escalation: make a bot that books with fake names, sell primo reservations on Craigslist.

iblaine• 13 years ago

After reading that I want 10 mins of my life back.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I don't understand why they don't do authentication to remove the bots if this really matters.

If it doesn't matter, they should raise prices.

This is an issue in NYC. Some $300/night restaurants have you hyperclicking the moment the reservations open up.

wdr1• 13 years ago

Having worked at Ticketmaster for a few years, the first thing that came to mind was the similarities in automated ticket-buying bots.

Thing is, is there really that much of an arbitrage opportunity with restaurant reservations? Is there a place I can go purchase restaurant reservations?

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

Do people actually use "foodie" unironically? I thought that was something people invented to stereotype suburbanites who'd caught on to "gourmet" meaning absolutely nothing; I didn't know until now that people actually called themselves "foodies". Wow, it's a weird world out there.

mkehrt• 13 years ago

Yes, definitely, people use it unironically.

dasmoth2• 13 years ago

It's certainly pretty common in the UK. Seems much less linguistically dubious than "gastropub".

(Why do "suburbanites" seem to get so much stick nowadays?)

moheeb2• 13 years ago

Well you have to have some way to differentiate them from the people that don't like food.

robk• 13 years ago

How are the bot owners flipping these reservations? I imagine there must be some commercial value via secondary market (or direct to concierges, offline), as bot-writers probably aren't actually using all these reservations themselves (or their friends). The more sane solution is to require full name when booking and ask for ID at the door. A name change has to be manually handled by the restaurant or would require rebooking. That would stop transfers and any market for these bookings.

obelos• 13 years ago

It could be that a few savvy people always want a reservation or two on deck. They queue up reservations, say one table per week for two months. When that week comes up, if they don't want the table they cancel it. If they do end up having a need for it, how cool does it look to be able to tell your date that you can get a table at their favorite hot restaurant tomorrow?

pclark• 13 years ago

tangential but has anyone been to state bird provisions? I keep meaning to go, but don't because of the reservation saga.

linuxhansl• 13 years ago

Reminds of the tickets to "walk" up Half Dome (Yosemite park). After some folks died a few years back, the number of folks is limited and you have to get a ticket.

All tickets for the year are gone on the first day they become available and then lo and behold you can suddenly buy the tickets (for a considerable markup) elsewhere. The folks scooping up the tickets like this are parasites. The solution is to limit the number of tickets per person or to disallow reselling.

(Haven't tried for a while out of frustration, might be different now)

I know, slightly tangential to the article.

westicle• 13 years ago

If an establishment wants to give non-techies the opportunity to attend, yet remain "accessible" to those without piles of money, there are a few solutions.

1. Don't take reservations.

My favourite restaurant operates on this basis. On a Friday or Saturday night you will queue for up to an hour for a table. If you prefer to avoid peak hour, there is rarely any queue for lunch. I've eaten there over 100 times and I still don't begrudge the time spent in the queue.

2. Run a lottery

Popular theatrical productions are great at this. If you don't want to book months ahead (or can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars), Book of Mormon offers a ticket lottery before every show. Just show up at the theatre and enter for your chance to win one of 21 discounted, front-row tickets.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that the establishment in the OP wants to let the poor and/or technological illiterate to attend. However other places have managed to do so without hurting their brand.

tomjen32• 13 years ago

If I can't be sure to get a table/ticket I may come, but I am not bringing a date or a friend and risking ruining our evening.

qq662• 13 years ago

The people saying "raise the prices" don't realize that the scarcity of the restaurant is an asset in itself. Restaurants become famous for being impossible to get a table at. The chef is more respected by his or her peers and the media. Newspapers write articles about the restaurant. The restaurant's cookbook starts selling more copies on Amazon. The chef is invited to an interview on Food Network. None of these things happen if they raise the prices until there's no excess demand.

Ferrari also has a long-standing policy of manufacturing "one fewer car than the market demands."

otterley• 13 years ago

My experience with restaurants is that if one is too popular, just wait a little while. Eventually the mob's attention will turn to the next heretofore-undiscovered gem, and you'll find it's much easier to finally check out the previous one.

Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

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