This is just a highly visible problem. Bots make getting reservations at popular restaurants impossible for normal people. So they aren't necessarily being priced out they're being excluded by not being in the know. Which is frustrating. I'm in the know, thanks to my wife, and we still sometimes need to try for weeks to get a reservation because we refuse to pay on the black market.
Couldn’t restaurants have required an up front non refundable deposit and required the name of the person eating at the time of making the reservation?
Airlines/rental cars/hotels have solved this problem without legislation.
There are five different airlines, five different rental car companies, and five major hotel chains*. There are a million different restaurants, most of whom handle reservations with infrastructure consisting of a phone, a piece of paper, and a pen.
So what? Demand ID from the booker for people on the guest list to be seated. This is a solved problem and something that restaurateurs can fix in less than one second. No need for any legislation, no need for any digital system.
The people that show up also probably spend more if they paid for the reservation.
I’m a little curious why the restaurants don’t just charge more. From my simplistic understanding of economics, this sounds like consumers are willing to pay more for it, but restaurants are letting scalpers eat the excess. There must be a reason, they know the market better than me, just curious what it is.
Restaurants want to be as busy as possible as much as time as possible and to sell as high value produce as possible and tip the waiter well. And to come back when they're not booked up.
Scalpers just want to skim a margin off the top at peak time, and don't give a shit whether people think they've overpaid for the experience and end up skipping dessert and ranting about how mediocre it was on social media. Or indeed whether they actually sell all the reservations at all they haven't paid for, especially if the profit maximizing fee is one that leaves it half empty...
I’m curious about that too. My speculation is they think there aren’t enough people to fill their dining rooms who are willing to pay that much more. They could probably do something like auctioning off a certain number of last minute reservations, but then they risk looking predatory.
I'm happy to have my identity verified to get a reservation at a nice, popular restaurant without having to pay on the black market, and most of the people I know are the same.
