31–40 of 167 posts
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).
You can also nook from the phone a couple of days in advance usually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
McDonalds.
Sure, that's one kind of restaurant. I've never heard of anyone trying to get a reservation there, though, and I'm pretty sure there's a direct relationship between the lack of demand for reservations, and the restaurant's ability to scale.
Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
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.
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…
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.
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…
One could always use a Captcha to stop bots if it became a problem.
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.
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 s…
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...