How I Became the Most Hated Person in San Francisco for a Day

http://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-person-in-san-francisco-for-a-day/

by bmmayer1 • 12 years ago

52 72 12 years ago

majormajor• 12 years ago

The bigger ethical question seems to me to be that you're taking something the restaurant chooses to offer as a free convenience, without price-discrimination, and turning it into a game of "who will pay the most to go to this restaurant."

Yes, you say you've started out small, with manual phone usage, etc. But then you go on to say: "So in the interest of ethics and fairness, I want to talk to restaurants about working with them directly on a better reservation system." Sounds like you want to scale it, and make money off of it yourself, after all.

Whereas it seems to me that for high-demand restaurants the manual approach, exists that way because it won't scale. Anyone can get a reservation, if they're willing to wait a few weeks, it doesn't matter what they're willing/able to pay. And once you automate that, how do you keep it from being abused and effectively turning into a sort of demand tax? In which case the restaurant could be pocketing that money themselves by simply making the cost of dining there that high in the first place, but if they didn't, it's probably because they didn't want to restrict so heavily based on spending ability. (Well, and because pricing/markets is tricky, and who knows if it would've been successful initially at a higher price... this part is just speculation on my end.)

keehun3• 12 years ago

I wrote a comment, too, but I agree with you that it's impossible (or seemingly so) to keep it from abuse and turning it into a demand tax (which the restaurant themselves should pocket).

greenyoda• 12 years ago

Making reservations under assumed names (i.e., lying) is also unethical.

"So in the interest of ethics and fairness, I want to talk to restaurants about working with them directly on a better reservation system."

It's not likely that a restaurant (or anyone else) would want to go into a business partnership with someone who has clearly demonstrated that they're willing to lie to make a buck.

Also, as a commenter in the Valleywag article[1] pointed out, it's easy for restaurants to defeat this: just require diners to show an ID to claim their reservations.

[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/restaurant-reservation-scalping-...

__david__3• 12 years ago

Making reservations under assumed names (i.e., lying) is also unethical.

What? As someone who frequently puts in random names for reservations, I fail to see what is unethical about this…

Why on earth does a random restaurant deserve my real name? The transaction going on there is on a different level than that.

It's easy for restaurants to defeat this: just require diners to show an ID to claim their reservations.

Again, no. If a restaurant demands ID before they seat me, that is a restaurant I will never patronize.

mathattack• 12 years ago

Isn't there a service that works with restaurants to allow them to sell their own reservations?

onwardly• 12 years ago

The path forward, with benefits for restaurants and our entrepreneur here, is this: see if people are willing to pay for reservations at in-demand restaurants. If so- great. You clearly can't scale this without getting restaurants in on the game. So- partner with the restaurants. Charge $20 for a reservation. Give the restaurant $10. The restaurant made extra money, their no-show rate goes down, the diners already have skin in the game and are likely to spend more than average patrons, and our main man here makes some cash.

To me it seems like an innocent-enough experiment. If he wants to scale it, he'll have to make it work for restaurants too. And if he does- great! Margin-stressed restaurants get an extra source of income.

Mikeb857• 12 years ago

Restaurants manage supply/demand with menu prices. They manage reservation slots. Some take CC numbers.

By making fake reservations, he's not solving any problem, only creating a new one - he's artificially reducing the supply of reservations, and then charging for them.

jpeg_hero• 12 years ago

So close to parody... but alas not.

Get bent.

keehun3• 12 years ago

Since he is willing to cancel his reservations, why the hate? I get that this is basically scalping, and I hate scalping. But scalpers don't (or maybe can't) return their tickets for anyone else to grab them.

What I see here is a service that allows people who didn't plan far enough in advance to be able to enjoy an experience at a premium (or maybe a fee/penalty cost) that they otherwise would not have. The customers of this service have already incurred a penalty of sorts.

I don't see this as (yet) an abusive economic system that disgustingly inflates prices in some sort of a monopoly-style hierarchy (which ticket scalping does). There is unprecedented room to badly abuse this system, and I would hate to see that happen.

However, I think what he did should not incite so much hatred. I personally am against this sort of thing but that doesn't mean I am going to spread hate. Ticket scalpers, though...

In another variety, I've seen newspapers/blogs do this sort of advanced-fake-reservations and give them away as prizes. I'm not sure which is worse.

I would hope that restaurants take measures to make these kinds of things difficult to pull off. Maybe assess some additional tip amounts if the reservation name doesn't match anyone in the group, or asking for an ID when they first enter the restaurant (although I think this would be bad customer experience).

There's so much room for abuse with solutions that needlessly disrupt the experience.

Liesmith2• 12 years ago

Here's the problem: with scalpers, someone has already paid for the ticket. the venue and the act are getting money. With this guy, the whole purpose of reservations (restaurants being able to manage demand) is undermined. When people don't show up for a reservation, the restaurant suffers. Unless this dude sells 100% of the reservations he has made, restaurant owners are getting screwed here.

keehun3• 12 years ago

I would agree with you, but you missed the point where he said that he cancels all of his reservations within a certain amount of time before the reserved time (he did not say how long) so that somebody else may use that slot. According to him, he does not let a reservation be used to hurt the restaurant to the best of his ability.

If someone buys a reservation from him and doesn't show up at the restaurant, I'm not sure if it's entirely his fault. With that kind of disregard for reservations, there's a big chance that they would've stood up on a reservation they made themselves for free.

mvid5• 12 years ago

The response isn't to make it "difficult to pull off", the response is to do it themselves. Require a credit card on file for a reservation and a 24 hour cancellation period.

The harm to the restaurants right now is potential lost income and lost tables. Keeping a card on file would negate the lost tables and keep players like this app from skimming value off the top, unless they were willing to wager their own money on the resale value.

r00fus• 12 years ago

Two costs to implementing that: 1 - people get nervous giving out their CC info. 2 - sometimes people like be anonymous (famous or cheating? not going to give ID).

Mikeb857• 12 years ago

Since he is willing to cancel his reservations, why the hate?

Let's say I'm running a 60 seat restaurant, and he has claimed 10 of the seats for a Friday night. I have bought supplies to cook for 60 guests. If he doesn't sell his 10 seats, I'm left cooking for 50 guests, and now have excess food, which is highly perishable, and can make up anywhere from 30 to 50% of the costs of the dishes I'm serving.

In addition, places that do accept reservations well ahead of time are less likely to receive 'walk-in' guests, as the reputation of only taking reservations discourages people from trying their luck.

He advertises last-minute reservations, so he's probably cancelling his reservations a few hours before service, which is nowhere near enough time to re-book those tables, given that anyone interested would have simply booked at a different restaurant.

__david__3• 12 years ago

Well, he also claims to only do restaurants with high demand, so if the restaurant can accept 10 extra walk-ins that night instead of turning them away then everything works out.

51Cards3• 12 years ago

My biggest issue with this service is the tables that don't sell.

As mentioned, scalped tickets, while not the most ethical thing, at least put the listed amount of money into the hands of the artist and incur a financial risk to the scalper. This potentially ties up a bunch of tables that may never earn any income and if I was a restaurant finding myself on this service I would be pretty ticked. The number of people who know to look here for a reservation is minute, let alone willing to pay for that reservation. I'm betting that a high number of those tables sat empty tonight and those restaurants are already out money.

Additionally if the restaurant has done all the work to create such a high demand for their seating, they should be the ones pocketing the profit off of it.

At the end he asks to work with this industry but has already begun screwing them. I'm thinking not the best method to foster co-operation.

cleverjake• 12 years ago

I'm betting that a high number of those tables sat empty tonight and those restaurants are already out money

having worked in restaurants, once someone is more than 10-15 minutes late for a reservation with no advanced call, the table is free game. Enough people come stumbling in without a reservation for "hot" restaurants to even notice.

51Cards3• 12 years ago

However 10-15 minutes late would also mess up the timing for your next reservation for that table and starts to cause a log jam through the evening from what you expected you would be able to seat?

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

He mentions in the blog post that he cancels reservations that don't sell - 4 hours in advance.

andrewfong2• 12 years ago

IMHO, it's unethical to the extent that there's no value add over the customer directly reserving a table through the restaurant rather than through you. Otherwise, you're just engaging in a form of arbitrage. And arbitrage is only useful to the extent that it informs the supplier that there is excess demand (in this case, the restaurants are well aware there's excess demand if there's a line for seats).

That said, having customers have "skin in the game" does add value. But the ethical way to implement this would be to get the restaurants to consent to your system (and maybe get a cut). The value of a paid reservation varies by restaurant, and it should be up to them to decide if it's worth the risk of pissing off customers, not you.

teej• 12 years ago

Are you kidding? Of course it's useful to the customer! Do you know how annoying it is to get a reservation at some of these restaurants?

For example - ReservationHop has a 7:45pm reservation next Friday night to Zero Zero for 4 people. If I try to book the same date/time/party through Open Table, I only have 6pm and 8:15pm available. If I wanted to book that time I would have had to call weeks in advance.

I am getting convenience for money. That's a fair trade. And let's not act like this market didn't exist before. People have been doing this on craigslist and other sites for years.

andrewfong2• 12 years ago

There's no net win for customers overall. Your win is someone else's loss in that case. In fact, it's a net loss from an overall perspective since you had to pay ReservationHop.

The fact that people have been doing it for years does not make it ethical.

Mikeb857• 12 years ago

If they didn't have that 7:45 reservation for 4 people, it might still be open... They're artificially reducing supply, then selling it back and pocketing the difference.

davorak• 12 years ago

Are you kidding? Of course it's useful to the customer!

It is not clear to me that the benefit gained by the reservationhop user out weighs the negative externality[1] paid by the rest of the restaurant goers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

knofun• 12 years ago

Who cares about the reservations, you became my most hated person on the internet today for your crappy non responsive blog design that doesn't let me zoom on my phone without covering everything with your sidebar.

napsterbr• 12 years ago

Same here, couldn't read a word.

cheshire1372• 12 years ago

Had the same problem on my laptop because I wanted a larger font size for reading. Had to settle for something smaller to avoid the sidebar.

swang2• 12 years ago

Consecutive paragraphs beginning with "I understand" is then negated by following with a paragraph starting with, "But"

pyre• 12 years ago

I understand your general sentiment, but I don't particularly agree with it

mvid5• 12 years ago

I like to think that this kind of lost income will be the boot that kicks restaurants out of being so tech-fearing.

justizin2• 12 years ago

Honestly, this is a great example of why some places don't accept reservations at all, and make you stand for an hour on the street waiting to get in.

mvid5• 12 years ago

There are two cases you see at high end restaurants, either that they have no reservation system at all, or that they keep a card on file and charge you a preset cancellation price if you don't cancel more than 24/48/72 hours ahead of time.

Taking no reservations maximizes value for the restaurants, assuming it is hot enough to never have an empty table. It doesn't help consumers though.

Taking insured reservations causes more work for the restaurant, and generally the cancellation fee is less than the price of a 2 top with food/alcohol, so they are potentially missing out on money, but not much. It helps customers plan in advance though.

letstryagain• 12 years ago

This is just scalping for restaurant tables. Worse, reservations are free whereas tickets to events are not.

ChuckFrank2• 12 years ago

I disagree with the dominant sentiment about this being an example of JerkTech.

If RestaurantHop can prove through the resale of reservations, that there is value in these reservations, value that the restaurants, with a better pricing system, could capture, then I think this is great proof of concept for a new marketplace.

If restaurants have underestimated the value that reservations can capture, they might have just turned RestaurantHop away without a glance, if he had approached them with the idea of ticketing reservations, but now that he has bypassed the restaurants (by calling under a fake name), he proves that the reservations have value.

Now that it's clear that reservations have value, RestaurantHop can be the exclusive destination to purchase reservations for a night at a premium restaurant. Once you make that connection, then pricing strategies can go wild.

Some examples of that -

1. Cheap reservations made in advance. 2. Cheap last minute reservations when the nights are slow. 3. Expensive last minute reservations when the nights are busy. 4. Expensive reservations that require extra care - large groups, special dates, etc.

Here's the thing. I don't go to a place that has a long reservation wait time. Place where they say you need to book months in advance. I simply don't patronize those places. If there was a marketplace for me to evaluate (from Free to Expensive) the cost of making such a reservation for me, I would gladly do that.

I already do that with GoldStar, the ticketing service. Adding premium restaurant reservations to the mix would be great.

So I say, great start. Hustling to cover the reservation marketplace is going to be brutal, and if this takes off, competition is going to be fierce, with essentially no barriers to entry, but if there's an inefficient marketplace out there, that lacks transparency, and favors the connected, then I say -- go for it. Let's see how much money is being left on the table.

(That being said, I think Parking Monkey, or Monkey Park, or Park Monkey, or whatever their name is ... is a true example of JerkTech - stealing from the commons, and extorting value by behaving badly - I didn't like it when guys on the street did it, and I don't like it when an app does it.)

(( you can almost imagine BirthdayinthePark Monkey, or Place ontheBeach Monkey, or SeatontheBart Monkey. All terrible terrible ideas.))

justizin2• 12 years ago

"I simply don't patronize those places."

They quite simply don't need or want you to.

__david__3• 12 years ago

They certainly don't need him, but why don't they want him?

ChuckFrank2• 12 years ago

I meant no disrespect by saying that. It was simply a function of their availability and my scheduling capacity.

qu4z-2• 12 years ago

Not everything is about money.

Mikeb857• 12 years ago

This is sleazy. I've worked in restaurants for a long time (mostly fine dining), and this upsets me.

What he's doing is basically artificially reducing supply, making it harder to get a 'free' reservation, and then charging for it. Meanwhile, the restaurants may increase their supply of food based on the increased 'reservations', only to have them pulled out at the last second, because I highly doubt he's selling all his reservations.

In the end, everyone will suffer, because once restaurants catch on, they're either going to eliminate reservations altogether, or start charging for reservations themselves. Margins are so thin in restaurants, especially in the high end market, that they'll do anything to stamp out this type of profiteering.

kibibu• 12 years ago

Couldn't restaurants ask for some form of id for bookings that match the ones available on RestaurantHop?

Mikeb857• 12 years ago

There's many ways restaurants can weed out this behaviour, but the fact is, many take reservations purely out of good-will, since customer service is at the heart of the restaurant business.

This guy is basically destroying all the good-will and the faith that restaurants have in reservations, and they're not going to put up with his service.

By the way, what he does already exists, hotel concierges or matchmaking services will often make reservations on behalf of their clients. But in those cases, the restaurant establishes a relationship with the concierge which is mutually beneficial, and trust is created. In cases where this trust is broken, a restaurant will basically refuse to accept reservations from the concierge or service who abused the relationship.

jtchang• 12 years ago

Lots of kneejerk reactions here. I had the same until I thought about it a bit more. In a free market these reservations should generally go to the highest bidder.

On the one hand you could view it as the site being a market maker and injecting liquidity into restaurant reservations. Whether this is ethical or not is up for debate.

stove• 12 years ago

Odd that in such a candid launch article discussing reaction and site traffic he would skip over things like users created and, more importantly, revenue. In my opinion, this is a model where restaurant goers can 'pay with their pocketbooks' so to speak and my impression is that if this guy isn't talking about revenue- it ain't there and this model isn't going anywhere.

crdb• 12 years ago

2 solutions immediately come to mind for the restaurant:

- sell tickets instead of taking reservations (Alinea's solution, which saw no-shows drop from 8% to 0.5%; it used to be done in London in the mid 2000s, I remember giving my card details over and over again), although that's less practical for less hot spots, where that's enough friction to switch to a competitor;

- ask for ID or a card to check against the name.

How would you cope if either became common practice in your target markets?

socrates19982• 12 years ago

The backlash is hilarious.

People get outraged over nothing.

The hypocrisy is ridiculous. Instead of getting upset at how restaurants treat their workers, they get mad at some random guy who makes a few reservations at a few restaurants.

He is taking a bad system and trying to make it better.

Restaurants screw people over all the time, managers and owners take advantage of minimum wage and our tipping culture to make sure almost everyone who works at the restaurant are close to or under the poverty line.

You know why people get outraged? Because it is easy and they don't really have to do anything.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

OR people are frustrated that so many douchenozzles have had their rent-seeking ("making it better") institutionalized that the opportunity to set this jackanapes's minor brain fart on fire and watch it burn is too wonderful to pass up.

socrates19982• 12 years ago

Is it douchey? Yes, but I don't get how people act like they care about this guy and his very minor website.

Everyone wants to feel like they are a good person, so they put their heads in the sand for the big stuff like racism and wealth inequality, but they get "outraged" for this guy and his simple stupid website.

Liesmith2• 12 years ago

The phrase you are looking for is making it worse. What is better about his impact on the system? He's taking something that had no middleman before and setting himself up as one. Something that was free but no longer is. He's a leech on restaurants and is hurting their business, and charging customers where once they got things for free.

Now, if the world was full of guys like this, and the restaurant industry was choked with middlemen, and then he went and made a system where the customer could go right to the restaurant for their free reservation, that would be making things better. What this guy has done benefits no one but him.

yo-mf2• 12 years ago

Seems like your comment got downvoted, which is a shame because it was one of the few comments that spoke to the heart of the matter. Ignore all the other real injustices around the restaurant business, but go nuts over a small guy and his crap website.

I would say however that his attempt at making the system better is not really doing that. He does come off as a lowly scalper with his implementation.

_gd3l• 12 years ago

Don't lie and pretend to be an individual just making a reservation for a night out on the town.

Maybe this has value, is good or bad, whatever: but be clear with restaurants that you're a for-profit scalping business making money off their inventory.

The douchiness of scalping reservations can be argued....

But there is not a single logical defense for LYING to the restaurants about being an individual. Writing a blog post about why you're lying doesn't make it okay, either.

Be clear with businesses about what you're doing with what THEY broke their backs to build, and let them opt in if they want. Cool, could be a good service and help some restaurants out or something.

But stop lying. That is douchey, is unethical in every way with no justification, and is worthy of all negative media — regardless of how overkill SF media can be sometimes.

Stop lying.

jtmcmc• 12 years ago

You are a gigantic douchebag. You are trying to take a tax on top of something that did not need to be taxed. You are really representative of the problem with the startup scene and whenever I tirelessly defend it to my numerous friends throughout the bay I have to go 'see people like this give us a bad name but most are not like him.'

Mandatum• 12 years ago

This is really just ticket scalping for reservations. Yes, the restaurant could employ this themselves, however it's not going to benefit the consumer. Since it's gone mainstream (in terms of I'm a developer in New Zealand and my restaurateur friend already knows about it) - this is likely going to be trialed and implemented in a few places if it works out. It's already been introduced in bars and clubs as "bottle service", unfortunately you were just the guy who got caught up in the pitchfork-protests.

As a consumer, I'd hate for this to become a thing. Likely it's only going to work in SF because of the amount of disposable income. In other parts of the world it may work, but I doubt it would become mainstream.

Don't feel bad, this will blow over. Plenty of people have written and developed far more sinister applications that would have a far greater impact, but alas they didn't strike out. Hah, unfortunately for you, you got publicised pretty fast.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Scalping is unethical, whether it's a guy on a streetcorner or Ticketmaster. Some performers go to great lengths to prevent it. How is this guy surprised that many restaurants find the idea of scalping reservation odious?

swang2• 12 years ago

Also, if you have to reserve something under a name that is not your own, perhaps you are doing something restaurants don't want you to do.

codezero2• 12 years ago

It looks like the flamewar detector knocked this way off the front page really fast, any chance a mod can check it out?

dang• 12 years ago

It did, but I'm not sure it was wrong. The controversy/substance ratio on this piece seems pretty high.

codezero2• 12 years ago

Yep, though it seems like the vitriol is towards the subject rather than towards community members, but I didn't read all the threads so I trust you and the robots :)

jamesbrownuhh• 12 years ago

"Is this even legal? Is it ethical? ... To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions."

I'd suggest that this is exactly the issue.

lifeformed• 12 years ago

This reminds me of domain squatting. Imagine a world without domain squatters (or this): if people need a domain/table, they will just ask for it. If it's being used by someone else already, then they'll try a different domain/restaurant. The supply/demand is not interfered with by anything else.

Now here comes a service where the only person benefiting is the middle man. It's worse for the end user, because now they have to pay a fee to get what could've been theirs normally (or at least would've fairly been someone else's that was using it legitimately). It's worse for the provider, because now their user base's spending money has been diminished a little (less for you).

It makes sense that it exists, but it feels like a selfish thing. It's extracting money from a place that has value, but didn't need tapping.

Mikeb857• 12 years ago

Also, he claims in his post that Open Table is loathed - not true. Open Table allows you to see a guest's history, and lets you track good guests and bad guests. While it's not perfect and it does cost money, Open Table is a decent solution, hence why so many restaurants use it...

yo-mf2• 12 years ago

Actually OpenTable is loathed and I have worked at many restaurants that hated the fees, the crap software, and feeling they are forced to use it otherwise they would see a major dropoff in reservations. It should be noted that many of the hot and trendy places do not even use them because they are fortunate enough to not have to pay the "OpenTable tax" (their words from a number of folks). The only thing worse in the minds of most restaurant owners is Yelp. The "service" they provide truly is extortion.

bryang• 12 years ago

It's extortion. Plain and simple.

It's the same as people who buy concert or sport tickets simply for the resell. Yes it is done legally, but legality is not the same as ethics.

cheshire1372• 12 years ago

I'm not seeing the problem here. People are willing to trade money to avoid the time it takes to make a reservation themselves; sounds fine to me.

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