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Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

diogomonica.com

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Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#131

Post by dhugiaskmak »

tomkarlo wrote: post #119
spellboots wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There are some places in D.C. that require a credit card to make a reservation and charge for no-shows and people are FURIOUS about it.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#132

Post by obelos »

robk wrote: post #128

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 r…

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?

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#133

Post by njharman »

namdnay wrote: post #61
sien wrote: post #2

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?

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 issu…

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.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#134

Post by pyoung »

dhugiaskmak wrote: post #131
tomkarlo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are some places in D.C. that require a credit card to make a reservation and charge for no-shows and people are FURIOUS about it.

On the flip side, I made my first reservation through opentable a few weeks ago, and I was surprised when they DIDN'T ask for any cc info. Granted I was new to the experience, but the first thing that crossed my mind was I could not show up and it wouldn't be a big deal.

Feel like if they market this move a little better, they could convince their loyal customers that this will allow them a better chance at getting reservations.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#135

Post by Fuzzwah »

__david__ wrote: post #127
Fuzzwah wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ban bots with out implementing an arcane, clunky, painful, expensive manual system? PS: your answer isn't allowed to be captcha.

You don't. I'd much rather suffer through a captcha than have the tickets/reservations sell out in seconds.

Here's the thing though: you've got two people who are eagerly waiting for the purchase / booking of something to become available. One of them is going to do it all manually. The 2nd person has a bot to do all the form filling in leg work but will manually solve the captcha.

Who wins?

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#136

Post by mcguire »

PeterisP wrote: post #107
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In order to determine who wants X the most, you have to ask credible commitments. Getting up at 4AM to make a booking when it becomes available; or waiting in a three-hour queue; or spending time writing a bot is just as significant commitment as paying some extra dollars, so all of those will work to allocate the scarce thing. But there is a major difference - if you spend three hours in a queue, you lost those hour…

One of the neat things about dollars is that they are convertible into [someone else] getting up at 4AM, [someone else] waiting in a three-hour queue, and [someone else] writing a bot.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#138

Post by theorique »

mcguire wrote: post #136
PeterisP wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to determine who wants X the most, you have to ask credible commitments. Getting up at 4AM to make a booking when it becomes available; or waiting in a three-hour queue; or spending time writing a bot is just as significant commitment as paying some extra dollars, so all of those will work to allocate the scarce thing. But there is a major difference - if you spend three hours in a queue, you lost those hour…

One of the neat things about dollars is that they are convertible into [someone else] getting up at 4AM, [someone else] waiting in a three-hour queue, and [someone else] writing a bot.

That's why you can hire a homeless to do it for you. At Disney World, rich families are actually hiring officially disabled people to get them line skip passes so that they can jump the lines.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#139

Post by rdouble »

theorique wrote: post #138
mcguire wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the neat things about dollars is that they are convertible into [someone else] getting up at 4AM, [someone else] waiting in a three-hour queue, and [someone else] writing a bot.

That's why you can hire a homeless to do it for you. At Disney World, rich families are actually hiring officially disabled people to get them line skip passes so that they can jump the lines.

In the olden days, you didn't need to be "officially" disabled, you could just have your brother sit in a wheelchair.

Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

#140

Post by dasmoth »

michaelochurch wrote: post #126

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.

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?)

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