F. Scott Fitzgerald is often quoted as saying “The rich are not like you and me”. He never actually said that. That is actually a misquote, a paraphrase from part of a longer passage in one of his short stories.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
I was reminded of one way in which the rich differ from me when I read this article about the enormous difficulty involved in getting reservations to chic restaurants in New York City, and the extraordinary lengths that some people will go to to get one. It is no longer the case that a simple phone call is all that is needed. It also used to be that if you are wealthy, you might be able to get a table by quietly slipping the maitre d’ some money. But now the reservation process has become a world of websites that specialize in reservations, bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers and you could be out several hundred dollars or more before you even step foot into the restaurant and even that requires booking days, weeks, or even months in advance. It helps, of course, if you are a celebrity.
There are now websites like Appointment Trader for people to make and buy and sell reservations.
Appointment Trader cleared almost six million dollars in reservation sales during the past twelve months, a more than twofold increase from last year. New users create an account with their e-mail address to buy or sell reservations; sellers compete to earn “Traderpoints” and “medals,” which allow them to upload more reservations and thereby make more money.
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Prospective buyers browse a list of restaurants organized by locale. Frey designed an algorithm that determines the most popular places based on reservation requests; in New York, 4 Charles, Tatiana (an Afro-Caribbean place at Lincoln Center), and COQODAQ (Flatiron Korean fried chicken) currently top the list. Users can click around a glitchy Google Maps plug-in, or type a restaurant’s name in the search bar. You can buy a limited selection of “instantly available reservations”—an indoor Friday-night four-top at Don Angie, a modern Village trattoria, for two hundred and twenty-five dollars—or place a bid, for a restaurant and a time of your choosing.Then individual resellers (for instance, FlirtatiousCanvas69, ExpeditiousFork45) can accept the bid and fulfill it by any means necessary. The buyer is informed of what name to give when he or she shows up to claim the table. (This can lead to awkward moments at the host stand, particularly for couples on dates: men sometimes are obliged to give other women’s names and fumble for phone numbers—the name and number on the purchased reservation.)
So who are the resellers, mercenaries, and hustlers who provide Appointment Trader with prime tables? Some are people who sit with OpenTable or Resy pulled up on their laptops every morning, amassing reservations in various names. Some are kids who borrow their parents’ Amex black cards, telephone Amex’s Centurion concierge, and book hard-to-get tables that are set aside for card users. Others call in favors with friends in the industry, bribe maître d’s, or e-mail reservationists with made-up stories—a diehard foodie visiting town (“we have always been desperate to come and try your delicious looking Lasagna!”), or pretending to be the Queen of Morocco or the sister of the King of Saudi Arabia. The chef Eric Ripert, of Le Bernardin, widely considered one of the best restaurants in the world, told me that it’s not uncommon for callers to scream at and even threaten his reservationists.
This has spawned careers for people who are constantly on the phone or on the web getting reservations under false names and then reselling them.
Alex Eisler, a sophomore at Brown University who studies applied math and computer science, regularly uses fake phone numbers and e-mail addresses to make reservations. When he calls Polo Bar, he told me, “Sometimes they recognize my voice, so I have to do different accents. I have to act like a girl sometimes.” He switched into a bad falsetto: “I’m, like, ‘Hiiii, is it possible to book a reservation?’ I have a few Resy accounts that have female names.” His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations.
Another reseller, PerceptiveWash44, told me that he makes reservations while watching TV. He was standing outside the break room at the West Coast hotel where he works as a concierge. “It’s, like, some people play Candy Crush on their phone. I play ‘Dinner Reservations,’ ” he said. “It’s just a way to pass the time.” Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations. He’s good at anticipating what spots will be most in demand, and his profile on the site ranks him as having a “99% Positive Sales History” over his last two hundred transactions. It also notes that he made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare.
…To be clear: every night in New York, there are hundreds of perfectly good seven-thirty tables available at perfectly good restaurants. For a lot of diners, though, the pleasure is in the scarcity; and the smaller, noisier, and more crowded a restaurant is, the better.
You would think that with such high demand, these restaurants would be minting money. But, puzzlingly, that does not seem to be the case.
According to the market-research firm IBISWorld, over the last decade, profit margins at American restaurants have languished at around four per cent. Gitnux, another research firm, reported that high-end restaurants may only see margins of two per cent. Ripert laughed and said, “Clients shouldn’t know we have slim margins. They should come here, have an experience, and leave very happy.” Other restaurateurs told me they wished their diners understood that every minute a restaurant is open is money earned or money lost; four out of five restaurants close within five years. “We’re constantly bleeding money,” Jenn Saesue, of the perennially booked Bangkok Supper Club, told me. “I basically have a small army,” she said, of her hundred and twenty-eight employees. “These people are relying on us.”
I very rarely eat at restaurants, usually only when I am traveling. When for some reason I am not able to cook for myself, I order take out, pick it up myself, and eat at home, so the world described in the article was totally foreign to me. I cannot for the life of me imagine going to such trouble and expense to eat at any place. But clearly some people are willing to fork out a lot of money and spend a lot of effort to eat in certain restaurants. It surely cannot be that it is because the food is of such superior quality. Maybe the ambience is what some are seeking. But I suspect that some kind of status thing is involved, a way to impress people, that getting a reservation and being seen at certain restaurants signifies that you are somebody.
People are willing to spend money on things they like. Last summer, people were spending thousands of dollars to buy tickets from a scalper to the Taylor Swift concert. People pay thousands of dollars to get premium sportzballz tickets. People spend hundreds of dollars to get reservations at a restaurant. People pay similarly stupid amounts of money to buy illegal drugs. It’s all stupid to me, but clearly it’s not stupid to them--because they’re paying it.
As far as restaurants go, maybe they need to re-examine how they do business? At my house, we like a couple of different restaurants. When we want their food, we call them up on the phone and place an order or go over in person if we want a sit-down meal there. The money goes directly to the restaurant, not to any third-party money-skimmers. During the worst of the pandemic, we bought prepaid meals from our favorite mom & pop restaurants to help them them stay afloat, and now we’re working our way through that.
I’m all for this. This is people at the bottom separating people at the top from their money, in return for basically nothing beyond what sounds like some minimal effort. It’s not quite rentierism in reverse -- the sellers are still doing some work, after all, albeit indoor work with no heavy lifting -- but I approve of it so long as it’s functioning as a tax on laziness. Meanwhile, it’s nice to know that rich pricks are congregating in ” the smaller, noisier, and more crowded” restaurants, so I can easily avoid them by going to larger, quieter, less crowded places and having a nice time.
Meanwhile, delivery services are taking a chunk out of the working class’s salary:
https://www.vox.com/money/24118201/food-delivery-cost-expensive-doordash-ubereats-grubhub
Luxury restaurants: Status signalling. Like driving a Rolls Royce. “I am not one of the peasants”.
Well, to me, this feels like fraud.
The app encourages people to acquire limited resources from the provider of those resource, with the intention to not use those resources, but resell them again. This is exactly the same form of device as what happened early in the internet days when people registered internet domain names without any intent to use them, but to sell them again to companies who were not fast enough to grab them themselves.
That was called cyber-squatting, I suppose this could be called reservation-squatting.
There is harm being done to the restaurants. Restaurants accept reservations with the understanding that they are guaranteed those customers. While customers will cancel reservations at times, most customers view a reservation as a commitment to the restaurant. However, in this case, the person making the reservation has no intention of visiting the restaurant.
Reservations which are not re-sold are not fulfilled. Which means empty tables in the restaurant, which means less income. There are possibly people who could have been seated at those tables who have been turned away because they were reserved. Even if the app sends a cancellation notice to a restaurant once the reserved time passed (which would be possible although the article doesn’t indicate if this is done), the restaurant may have declined non-fraudulent reservations already because those fraudulent reservations had been made.
I can see, and appreciate, the comments above. Applauding the people who are taking money from the rich who are willing to pay an inordinate amount of money to get a table without planning ahead and making a reservation themselves. But this is another instance where people are inserting themselves between a provider and a buyer, and using the position they have created to benefit wealthy people (who are willing to pay for the privilege of not planning) and cut out the non-wealthy who may be interested in visiting a restaurant but can no longer afford to make a reservation. This is pure rent-seeking.
If this spreads (and I’m not saying it will), the only solution for the restaurants is to not take reservations. Which itself will reduce the visits to their restaurant because most people do not like to be turned away when the place is busy.
I think restaurants can make a pretty good case that this rent-seeking is harming their business. There are a lot more middle-class people who are not going to pay a middle-man for a reservation, leaving the restaurants reliant on enough rich people deciding to dine at their location or go out of business to the detriment of everyone but the fraudulent reservation maker who can just drop that restaurant from their list.
For what it’s worth, my wife and I do not eat out all the often, but when we do, we enjoy ourselves. We rarely make reservations, usually the restaurant can find a place for a couple. On occasion, however, we’ve gone to places which look at us and decide we are not the clientele they would like. Not that we are shabby, but we are not chic. One of the funniest times was when we were told there was a 40 minute wait, and it clearly was a message to go someplace else. We decided to stay anyway, and sat in the reception area, cluttering it up in our non-chic way, bringing down the tone. We were given a table in 5 minutes. Then we had cocktails, appetizers, soup with a bottle of wine, salad, another couple bottles of wine with our main course, dessert with cordials, and then coffee. We laughed, tasted, enjoyed our meals so thoroughly and obviously that the manager came over and chatted us up.
Their usual customers were young university students dating. Their usual customers were there to be seen, they were chic, they didn’t obviously enjoy the food or the wine but wanted to display themselves to their dates and their peers. And their usual customers had an main course with a single glass of wine and then left. The fact that we were enjoying our food, enjoying our wine, trying a lot of their food, and just enjoying being there, made the waitstaff and the cooks very happy.
We’ve found, over the years, that the thing which really makes the staff at a restaurant happy is being happy and enjoying ourselves. In Spain last year I got a surprise hug from the maître d’, I think because we showed how much we enjoyed the meal. We do tip well (when dining in regions where tipping is expected), but that does not make the staff as happy as seeing their customers really enjoying the food and the service. Of course, even if you do enjoy yourself, leaving a poor tip can ruin the good feeling you helped generate.
I think there’s another possible solution… Quite a few places here in the UK have started requiring deposits or credit card details to secure reservations, as they were having so much trouble with no-shows. Apparently post-lockdown it became quite common for people to book tables at a number of different places, and only decide where they actually wanted to go at the last minute (and not bother to cancel their other reservations). I haven’t heard as much about this recently, but I’m not sure if that’s because it’s happening less or people are just accepting it as a fact of life.
Ticket scalping (if we’re still calling it that) used to be illegal. People were taken away in handcuffs for trying to sell tickets at a markup in front of an arena. Now we have a sector of the economy based on it. At least the concert promoters got their money, there’s really nothing in it for the restaurants other than to brag about how much a reservation will cost you on the open market. “Reservations at Che Merd are going for $1,200. So, I think we’re doing pretty well”. So, now we’ve got another metric to gauge how much interest there is in a particular restaurant at the moment. Back in my day all we had was how far in advance you had to book a reservation.
Well, they’ll learn that that’s not a guarantee soon enough. As Dunc pointed out, UK restaurants have learned this lesson and adapted accordingly. I wonder how many years it will be before US restaurants get the memo -- or will they persist because they like the idea people are fighting over/paying for their spaces?
The reservations aren’t “fraudulent” -- there’s no expressed OR implied contract when you make a reservation at these places.
Demonstrably not the only solution, as has been pointed out.
Wow -- there’s just so much wrong with that.
First -- the wealthy people aren’t benefiting, they’re being exploited. They’re paying for something you or I could get for free. Second -- the non-wealthy aren’t being “cut out” by the reservation-maker. They’ve not got some special back-channel they’re using to make those reservations -- they just have a phone, same as you and me. The only ones cutting the non-wealthy out of going to these restaurants are the restaurants themselves -- charging $40 for a glass of wine, $70 for a starter, $150 for a main course and so on. So, y’know -- fuck ’em.
Finally, it’s NOT “rent-seeking” AT ALL. As I pointed out above -- by definition, the people selling these reservations have done work, work that other people value. All a rentier does is OWN something. These sellers own nothing tangible. They’re essentially selling their labour, but crucially they’re doing so in a way that does NOT in any way interfere in your (or my) ability to get a table at those places… assuming you (or I) can be bothered to ring up in advance. They’ve spotted a gap in a market and filled it, and I applaud them.
I think the restaurants who are aiming for the sort of clientele who will pay $800 for a reservation tonight can frankly go fuck themselves, or get with the programme and start charging for reservations like they do in the UK. That would end this kind of trading pretty much overnight and make the rich have to do a bit of planning. I see no downside to that plan.
@8, sonofrojblake,
I hesitated to write my opinion because of the near certainty that it would be challenged, and frankly there really isn’t a need to get into a pissing match. But let me start by pointing out what fraud is,
A person making reservations while concealing their intent to sell them to others to the detriment of the restaurant is engaging in fraud. The obvious rebuttal is that there is no detriment to the restaurant if someone engages in such an act. I disagree, the restaurant will lose business if those reservations are not purchased by others.
A good test is to ask yourself is if the people making these reservations were honest with the restaurant, would the restaurant still take their reservations? That is, if I called up a restaurant and said, “I want to reserve a table for four on August 9th at 8PM. I’m doing so because I think someone would want that time and will purchase these reservations from me.” Do you really think the restaurant would be okay with this? If you don’t think the restaurant would care for this, why?
Next, my words,
I should not have included the word “only”. That’s on me, I’m certain there are other options. But let’s take a moment to look at the option that was suggested, restaurants start taking credit cards and charge a nominal fee to hold a reservation. How much? $5? $10? $20? Let’s say $10.
This still doesn’t work and has other negative affects. The option is fine for people who are going to use the reservation. That is, if they have decided on a restaurant and call to reserve a table. It will certainly reduce the number of people who make a number of reservations and choose only one to keep. Someone making, say, reservations at five restaurants and going to only one of them would be out $80, which may be the price of a meal at the place they do attend. That works.
But let’s look at the people making, and selling, reservations. They can do math. Let’s say they make five reservations a day, so every day they are out $50. Over a years time they have spent $18,150 on reservations. How many do they need to sell to break even? 200 maybe? That’s at about $100 for each reservation they sell. They make 1,825 reservations and have to sell 200 of them over a year to break even. How likely is that? I don’t really know. Some will probably sell for more, and some for less, but there is a good chance the people making fake reservations will more than break even, they need to sell one out of nine at those number to break even, everything else is profit. And such is the nature of these type of scams, there will always be people who think that they will be the ones making the big money, even if they end up losing money doing it. This is another get-rich-quick scheme.
Next, the restaurants which accepted the reservations do get the $10, but how much more would they have gotten had the table actually been occupied? I’m not talking about the $1000/plate places, but the places where a main course costs $20, like an Outback Steakhouse, which does take reservations. No; I don’t know if these reservation sellers are targeting places like Outback, but if the barrier/cost of making a reservation is low, why wouldn’t they? Reserve tables at $10 a pop, and sell the reservations at $20 each? Why not?
Then there is the secondary effect. There will be some people who won’t want to provide credit card information while making a reservation. That is a lost customer.
At this price level the restaurant still hasn’t stopped the fake reservations, so then what do they do? Raise the deposit on a reservation more? That might reduce the number of fake reservations, but it also reduces the number of customers. For some popular restaurants they might not be able to raise the price enough. If a place charges $200 to make a reservation, but is very popular, the reservations may sell for $400. Or people may stop coming. While restaurants are always at the whim of the public, this adds one more dimension for failure.
Sure, there are other options. None of them are really particularly good.
Another definition for you;
Rent-seeking: economic wealth obtained through shrewd or potentially manipulative use of resources.
Rent-seeking does not mean no labor is involved, it means manipulating resources in order to generate a profit that exceeds the cost involved. We generally don’t care about rents in the 1% to 5% range, they can often be justified as the time/resources which are not captured in the transaction costs. But we are talking about much larger profits here. The cost of making a reservation is the cost of a phone call (or web reservation) to the restaurant. The restaurant gets nothing for the transaction, and in fact may lose from it. The rent-seeker holds onto the resource (the reservation) which cost them 5 minutes of time until it is worth hundreds of times what the cost was to them. There is a risk involved, that 5 minutes may not generate any return, but when it does, it’s a huge one.
To use the above example of restaurants charging for a reservation, that’s an additional cost. But if a place charges $10 to make a reservation and the reservation sells for $20, that’s about a 100% return on the investment. We are well into the range of manipulating an asset.
So? A lot of rent-seeking is in non-tangible assets.
How do you know that? Tables at a restaurant are a limited resource. When you ring up a restaurant and they say they have no tables to spare, are you certain that none of them are reserved by people trying sell the reservations? If a single table is reserved by someone who is not planning to use it, then maybe you could have made those reservations which were denied to you. I’m not saying this is common, I don’t think it is, certainly not at the restaurants I frequent. But your statement is overbroad. To say that there is no way this behavior could interfere with your ability to get a table is simply not true. Further, right now it appears limited in scope, but if this is sold as a get-rich-quick scheme it might spread pretty rapidly. A lot of people are looking for an extra buck for little work.
On that we can agree. Stopping people from making fraudulent reservations in order to sell them to the rich will do so. Stopping people from making fraudulent reservations will also help the restaurants.
Don’t think I’m trying to protect the rich here. I’d just as soon remove the warnings on plastic bags about putting them over your head and see how many suffocate (note: satire). And I also know that a lot of restaurateurs are greedy bastards who would boil their grandmothers for stock (note: also satire).
But I’m also completely fed up with people lying in order to collar a few more dollars.
Is cyber-squatting okay? In that case they didn’t even have to lie about what they were doing. They were buying a limited intangible resource cheaply and holding onto it, with no intention of using it, until they could find a buyer. They spotted a gap in the market and filled it.
From what I can see, your argument boils down to:
This is okay because only the stupid rich people who can’t plan ahead are affected.
I don’t agree. For what it’s worth, I’m not telling you that you must change your mind. Only that I don’t agree.
“But clearly some people are willing to fork out a lot of money…”
Heheheh. Good pun.
flex, @ #9: You overlook that the need to provide card details means that restaurants can tie a reservation to particular individual (or at least a particular card), and if they notice a pattern of abusive behaviour, they can stop accepting reservations from that individual. The OP notes that these people already have to adopt different voices and give fake names in order to prevent restaurants from realising what’s going on. Now, of course, there is the possibility that they could take it to the next level and get into credit card fraud to get around that, but then we’re getting into the realm of fairly serious criminality.
Also, we’re pretty clearly not talking about low-to-midrange places here. We’re talking about highly in-demand, exclusive venues in NY*. If people are spending hundreds of dollars just to secure a reservation, then they’re going to be spending substantially more than that on the food, so deposits and / or no-show fees will be in a commensurate range. It’s not unusual for in-demand places over here to charge the full set menu price for each seat on a no-show booking, which can easily run to hundreds of pounds per person when you’re talking about a 7-course tasting menu with matched wines.
Nobody’s scalping tables at Outback Steakhouse.
*Some are specifically named in the OP, and their menus are readily available -- for example, Polo Bar will set you back $34 for a corned beef sandwich, while Maison Close offers caviar appetizers starting at $390.
@11 Dunc,
Actually, I did consider the problem of credit cards, and I don’t think it’s a particularly difficult one for a person to overcome. All it takes is having a few dozen credit cards. The banks hand out cards like candy, and there are already people who do have dozens of cards. There is nothing intrinsically difficult about keeping a record of which cards were used at which restaurants and never using the same card more than once every few days at any specific restaurant.
There is another minor difficulty to overcome when using a credit card to reserve a table. That it will be obvious when the bill is paid that the card is different and the name on the card is different. But this creates a dilemma for the restaurant, not the person making a fake reservation. The restaurant has to decide whether to process the card which was provided at the end of the meal, when the people who ate the meal are right there and available, or process a card which they might suspect to have been used to fake a reservation. Which direction do you think they are likely to go?
As I said above, this doesn’t appear to be happening at lower range restaurants, but there is nothing stopping it from happening at those placed. I don’t know if it ever will or not, and I’m not particularly worried about it, which I why I’m not trying to convince others that their opinion is wrong.
But I think the analogy to ticket scalping is flawed. When a scalper buys tickets the venue get the full value of the tickets purchased by the scalper (at least the venue has some choice setting the prices per seat at a range which will make the venue some profit). That isn’t happening in this case, the restaurants are currently getting nothing for allowing the reservation to be made and also getting empty tables. Even putting a nominal fee on the reservation can result in an empty table, so a table which would normally bring in $100 in a two hour period now brings in $10? Unlike other entertainment venues, which are selling seats at a fixed price, a restaurant cannot charge the full price of a meal when the reservation is made.
I think the comparison to cyber-squatting is a better one. That is another case where a limited resource was being purchased not to be used but to be held unused in the hope someone would want to purchase it later for a lot more money.
I know a number of people see this as funny. I can see the humor in it myself. But in a, “Okay, that was a funny trick you played on people who can afford to throw money at a problem. Now let’s stop it before it grows to a problem which could result in restaurants closing because too many people think this will be a quick way to make some extra cash.” type of way. As mentioned above, this is fraud. Currently the fraud is aimed at people who are willing to spend the money, but condoning fraud even because it’s funny and not yet seriously hurting people is still not right.
No, but they can change the full price of a meal when the reservation isn’t honoured (or cancelled with reasonable notice) -- and some do already, as I mentioned. Some examples here: Customers are charged up to £375 at high end restaurants for ‘no shows’ and late cancellations. (Note, that’s £375 per person.)
@ Dunc, 13: flex has decided he’s right. Your evidence is irrelevant.
“Which direction do you think they are likely to go?”
If it were my place, this direction: thank you for paying on this card, here is your receipt. Now please produce the card that made the reservation, as stated in the t&cs. Can’t produce? BOTH cards are now barred, as are you. Good day sir.
@ 14
Behold sonofroj, business genius. X-D
(As they say in the classics, don’t give up your day job bub.)
Wow. Interesting article, and that’s new information for me. I understand the point of view from the restaurants, and it may make those restaurants unattractive to the people making fake reservations. It would be interesting to know how many of the complaints mentioned in the article were for no-shows or for fake reservations. That may not be possible. But there are a few points to make about this.
First, it shows that restaurants are hurt by no-shows. Which means reservations have value, value which is being acquired with little effort by the people making fake reservations. This value which is not transferred to the restaurants.
Second, this suggests that reservations are seen as contracts, with possible penalties for no-shows. sonofrojblake even refers to terms and conditions in comment 14. This suggests the people re-selling their reservations are selling the contract without consulting one of the parties in the contract. I don’t think this is illegal (I’m not a lawyer), but maybe selling a reservation already breaks the T&Cs, which would certainly be actionable as a breach in contract.
Third, the article indicates that some restaurants which are implementing this are charging the average price of the meal, others are treating it simply as a fine of £20. The article is unclear how common the higher charges are, and lists four examples. These are probably the most expensive, simply because that’s the nature of news article writing. One of the four charges £194 (unclear if it is per head), and one charges £50/head. What is also not mentioned is whether these charges change with the number of people in the party. It is much more common in the US that a party of 6 or more require reservations (and more commonly these days the tip is automatically added to parties of 6 or more).
Finally, stopping the practice of people inserting themselves into the reservation process, i.e. making table reservations and then selling them, only helps to reduce the problems restaurants have with reservations being made but people not showing up.
I will agree that if all restaurants starting charging the full costs of a meal to people who make a reservation and don’t show up this might reduce the practice of people making fake reservations and then selling them. But you are pushing the responsibility to avoid reservation fraud onto the restaurant. Restaurants which are known to charge £20 for missing a reservation will be less attractive to customers. I wouldn’t want to reserve a table at a restaurant which charge £50/head for a missed reservation without a 2-week notice. It would add injury to injury if an emergency cropped up preventing me from filling my reservation. There would be the costs associated with the emergency and then I would also charged hundreds of pounds by a restaurant? I’d rather have my meal somewhere else. Sure, not everyone is like me, but that restaurant has lost my custom.
To summarize: People are taking advantage of restaurants who take reservations by making reservations they have no intention of using themselves and selling those reservations to other people. This activity means restaurants will have empty tables and lose business. The solution suggested will, if done at a low level, not make up for the loss of revenue from an empty table and discourage customers from visiting restaurants. If this solution is done at large cost it may make up for the loss of revenue, but will further discourage customers. Further, if certain popular restaurants feel they have enough customers to be comfortable losing some, the people re-selling reservations now have a motivation to target less popular restaurants.
Rather than asking restaurants to change their policies, in a way which increases their cost and reduces their customer base, how about we just stop the people who saw an opportunity to make extra money by inserting themselves into the reservation transaction?
@14, sonofrojblake. Yes, I have formed my opinion of the practice of re-selling restaurant reservations. In my opinion it is a form of fraud. I have read the suggestions of alternatives to stopping this practice, and I consider those alternatives as less effective at ending this practice than just treating it as fraud and saying, “Don’t do this anymore, or there is chance you will be prosecuted.” I am willing to consider other alternatives.
I mentioned before that I can see the humor in the situation, and I can admire the cleverness in setting it up. But it is still fraud, and nothing anyone has written on this thread has convinced me otherwise. If you have evidence that it is not fraud, that the people making reservations and then selling them are not miss-representing what their intentions are, please show it.
I have also made it clear that I am not trying to convince you (or anyone reading this) that it is fraud. I’ve given my reasons for thinking it is fraud, if you find them unconvincing that’s fair enough.
But how? It’s all very well saying “we should just stop this”, but the hard part is actually doing it.
A good first step would be to kill the app(s) which makes it easy to sell the reservations.
That would probably stop the majority of it.
OK, cool -- so we just need (a) a robust, universally agreed and enforced regulatory framework for the internet, and (b) agreement under said universal regulatory framework that this sort of thing should be done away with, with no awkward lawyerly bollocks about “first amendment rights” or “it’s not actually illegal in at least some jurisdictions”… Easy! I’ll get the World Government and the Internet Police right on it.
It’s clear someone isn’t thinking things through. (Did I need the words “things through”? Maybe not.)
This is just hilarious. They’re targetting the Hermes and Rolex brigade -- people who wouldn’t be seen dead in an Outback Steakhouse. You’re thinking of Frasier’s dad when you should be picturing Frasier.
You might see it that way. The restaurant might. The customers demonstrably don’t, otherwise no-shows would be vanishingly rare and socially unacceptable.
I referred to a hypothetical situation in which a contract had been explicitly formed by the giving and receiving of credit card details, a situation it would be incumbent on the restaurant to explain clearly in their terms and conditions and which they would therefore be in a position to collect on legally. By contrast, if you ring me up and say “table for two at seven?”, then you don’t show, how well do you think I’d get on if I just rang you back and said “you owe me five hundred quid?”. I think you could suggest sex and travel and not fear any legal repercussions. I’m surprised you can’t see the difference.
No, it suggests the restaurant has been negligent in not explicitly setting out the terms and conditions of the contract and taking steps to ensure they can be acted upon if necessary. Or put another way -- there is no contract here, what are you burbling on about?
Really? /s
Well yeah… if any contract had been agreed to. It’s on the restaurant to prove they have a contract -- good fkin luck with that.
Heaven forbid one should hold the people who run a business responsible for doing things needed to make the business run at a profit. What next? Requiring them to pay taxes? Requiring them to keep the lights switched on? Don’t you know people who run a restaurant just want to cook? They don’t want any other mundane activities taking up their time.
Citation needed. It wouldn’t put me off, since I’m the sort of person who, if I have a reservation for seven thirty, will arrive at seven twenty five, every single time. The people who will be put off by it are the people you WANT put off by it -- flakes, arseholes, whatever you want to call them. I’d actively prefer a place that dissuaded such wasters from turning up. Yes, emergencies happen -- but y’know, shit happens. Suck it up.
You mean, APART FROM multiple people publicly discussing how they go about doing it every day and make loads of money doing it and they’re not getting arrested? Apart from that evidence? I mean -- if that evidence doesn’t impinge on your reality, I can’t see how anything else could, even in principle. You can call it fraud til you’re blue in the face, but people are clearly, demonstrably, legally doing it all the time and talking about it in the popular press. This should at least suggest to you that it’s perfectly legal and therefore not “fraud”, which is a crime. But like you say, you’ve decided. /shrug/ It must be lovely being you. Life must be so easy.
Are you now saying is that it would be too hard to prevent this fraud, so we shouldn’t even try?
Or we should wait until it starts affecting more people?
Or wait until enough restaurants close because the reservations they are getting are for people who don’t actually want to eat there?
I know that’s the typical way humans operate, ignore a problem until it affects them personally. But the time to correct a problem is when the problem is small, before it grows into a business with lobbyists and lawyers.
Apps have been blocked and shut down before, and fraud is illegal in most countries. This is a fairly local problem, if a restaurant starts getting a lot of people with non-local accents calling from overseas phone farms, they are likely to figure out that something is going on pretty quick. Enforce the local laws against fraud and this is likely to become fairly rare. No need for the internet police.
Just a threatened lawsuit against the Apple and Google app stores would probably get them off those platforms (and I admit I don’t know if they are currently on them). When a database is found to be a platform for this activity, warn the ISPs to block traffic to it or be considered complicit in fraud. Make it publicly known that law enforcement would consider this type of activity as fraud and charges could be laid.
Would it stop all occurrences? Probably not. But it would be a good step toward eliminating this type of fraud.
Do I really think any action will be taken? No. I doubt it really has enough attention, and a lot of people will see it as a punishment for stupid rich people. Our short discussion here will mean nothing. At some point a restaurant, or restaurant chain, or even a restaurant business association, like the National Restaurant Association in the US, will sue the creators of these apps for lost revenue. The result could be anything from shutting them down or getting a cut of the action. Few other people will care.
One final observation. There are often discussions in the FTB pages about the rent-seeking behaviors of the wealthy or oligopoly’s. Those behaviors hurt societies, and they usually impact the poor more than the rich. This is the same condition, but inverted in that this is a rent-seeking activity which impacts wealthy people more than poor people. I can appreciate the schadenfreude, but that still doesn’t make it right. As a society we should be working to eliminate fraud, not normalize it.
I am not speaking for either sonofrojblake or Dunc, but it seems clear that legally booking a restaurant table so you can sell that booking on is not fraud. Sure it may do damage to the kind of restaurant that has sufficient cachet to make it worthwhile, but that is different to being illegal.
So, in your opinion, an activity is not fraud if no one is charged for it?
The legality of making and then selling restaurant reservations has apparently not been tested. But that does not mean that miss-representing yourself to a restaurant does not constitute fraud. It just means that it hasn’t been tested.
The people making these reservations with the intent to sell are miss-representing their intent to the restaurants. They are letting the restaurant believe they wish to dine at that restaurant. They are doing so in order to gain control of a limited resource, to wit, table reservations, in order to try to sell that resource at a highly inflated profit. Misrepresenting yourself in order to gain control of a resource is fraud. It’s fraud whether you are charged for it or not.
Again, if the people making these reservations with a restaurant with the intent of selling them were upfront with the restaurant that they were planning on selling them, would the restaurant be okay with it? You haven’t answered that question, and I assume you would say that restaurants would refuse to give people reservations if they knew that those people would try to sell them. Why? Apparently it’s perfectly legal because people are openly talking about doing it, and making lots of money doing it. Why would the restaurant care?
What is the difference between legally and illegally booking a table at a restaurant?
Because some people may have missed it, I have been very careful to avoid saying that reserving restaurant tables in order to sell them to others is legal or illegal. I don’t know if that behavior is legal or not, and to the best of my knowledge it has not been tested by the courts.
But I can say that it is fraud. Way back in comment nine I provided a definition of fraud. No one has challenged that definition, and no one has tried to argue that this definition isn’t applicable to this case. It clearly is applicable, the people getting the reservations to sell are miss-representing themselves (some have to alter their voice because the restaurants have started to recognize them), and the restaurants are getting no shows on reservations which were made because no one purchased them. Restaurants wouldn’t give away reservations to people who are not expecting to use them, so the people getting those reservations are knowingly miss-representing the truth in a manner which will be to the detriment of the restaurant. That is fraud.
Oh, if only this information was readily available somewhere, such as in Mano’s original post! Wouldn’t that be handy? Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to speculate baselessly then…
Wait a minute! What’s this?
Websites. Not apps. Websites! Not controlled through anybody’s app store then, and potentially operating from anywhere in the world.
You know, I’m really starting to remember why I’d decided it generally wasn’t worth my time commenting here anymore.
I’m all for this. This is people at the bottom separating people at the top from their money, in return for basically nothing beyond what sounds like some minimal effort.
Actually, I think it’s more a case of people in the middle (restaurant owners and reservation-service operators) sticking it to other people in the middle (people who desperately want to dine in “chic” restaurants). People truly at the top generally get to avoid petty middleman fees, either by having direct relationships with vendors, or by having people of their own making the calls for them.
And therefor untouchable?
It’s too bad we can’t do anything about the monkey-killing channels, and nothing about those human trafficking websites. The web is completely autonomous and nothing can be done until we get those global treaties and internet police force. So let’s throw up our hands and do nothing at all. (note: satire)
Leaving aside the satire, as I wrote earlier, I don’t think anything is likely to be done about this. There are some ways to deal with the issue, I’ve thought of a few more beyond those ideas mentioned above. Restaurants will probably adopt some. It is still fraud. It encourages mistrust.
In addition,
I find this very odd. Because I have done nothing more than state my position, and why I hold it, from the initial post. I even said in my initial post that I expect people will disagree with me. I do not care that you have a different position. You seem to be trying to get me to change my position. You didn’t need to. You could have read what I wrote, understood where I was getting my position from, acknowledge that it’s a position that you can understand but you don’t hold yourself, and move on.
Instead there is a series of posts with an apparent, “Gotcha! You must admit your position is untenable now because of this detail!” I’m happy to admit when I was unclear, or made a categorization error (as in my use of “only” above), but nothing which been presented to me has convinced me that somehow, people lying about their intentions to get something which is typically free (or cheap), in order to sell that something to others at an incredibly inflated rate isn’t fraud. That’s practically the definition of fraud.
But if you don’t agree with that, okay with me. You engaged with me. I did not seek you out and ask you to start a conversation. If you feel your time was wasted, I am sorry that happened but it had nothing to do with me.
Sorry, that was unnecessarily snarky of me. You’re right, and I apologise. Talking about “tech innovation” and the related regulatory failures gets me riled up, and it leaks out in unhelpful directions.
Since tech-enabled fraud is basically the only area of real growth and innovation these days, here’s how I think this is actually going to go down:
Some Silicon Valley VCs are going to throw a bunch of cash into this. There will be a pincer movement to drive independent resellers out of the market -- on the one hand, restaurants will be encouraged to cut out the middle man and list their reservations for auction directly (initially under quite attractive terms), and on the other hand, the platforms (funded by that VC cash) will use a combination of web scraping, automation, and low-waged gig workers in the developing world to capture every reservation they can themselves. The increased efficiency will make it economic to go down the value scale, so even lower-end places such as Outback Steakhose will get sucked in. It will become increasingly difficult to secure a reservation anywhere by any other means. A wave of consolidation will ensue. In five years time, bidding on one of the two or three remaining auction platforms will just be the accepted way of booking a restaurant reservation in most big cities. Enshittification will kick in to high gear, sucking more and more cash out of both buyers and sellers until it eventually (in combination with a range of other economic factors) triggers a wave of bankruptcies in the already ailing restaurant sector, wiping out almost everything except the very low and the very high end. The VCs run off with the money. The end.
I’d lay odds this process has already started.
Perhaps “fraud” isn’t quite the right term… What we see going on all over the place isn’t really fraud in the classic sense, but rather what you might call “nonconsensual intermediation”: where somebody manages to force their way in between the parties of an existing customer / supplier relationship, without being invited or really desired by either party, for the purpose of extracting a rent from the transactions.
Yeap, that’s just how I see it.
I only just now realized that it was the term “fraud” which apparently got people upset. I don’t really know why, what makes this fraud as opposed to other cases where people/companies are inserting themselves into existing transactions is that the insertion requires a deliberate lie. Currently, the only way this works is for the person collecting reservations to resell is for them to lie to the restaurant. Lying in order to get control of a resource is fraud, even if no one is charged for it.
As you say, in the future, maybe even the near future, the restaurants will try to get into the game directly. They will see the profits these people are making, want some of that sweet cash themselves, and partner with reservation auction platforms. At that point it will cease to be fraud. But it will lead to enshittification.