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Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

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

#151

Post by zpao »

tomkarlo wrote: post #120
Aloisius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restaurants typically hold back inventory from online reservation systems for two reasons. They either think they can fill seats and they rather not pay the per cover fees OT and UrbanSpoon charge or they want to hold seats for walk-ins. Well three if you count timing seating to keep the front of the house and kitchen from being overloaded. State Bird Provisions however has so much demand that there is a line for wal…

From their site: "We welcome walk-ins on a first-come, first-served basis and set aside about a third of our seats for those guests every night, including our chef’s counter and several tables in the dining room. "

I tried that once, very shortly after open on a Wednesday. The wait was 2-3 hours. It's a popular place.

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

#152

Post by qq66 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #54
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?

That's why I stopped buying things via auctions and stick only to "buy now" solutions. Sniper bots combined with friends bumping up prices on auctions means that a typical auction is a waste of money (price bumped up) and time (you can't win with 10 sniper bots aiming for the very millisecond the auction ends). Yeah, playfield got leveled because now everybody and their dog can use snipers (hey, where's the reward fo…

The "solution" to sniping is only in eBay's hands; either sealed-bid auctions (which they effectively are today) or a policy of extending the auction one hour past the last bid.

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

#153

Post by qq66 »

The people saying "raise the prices" don't realize that the scarcity of the restaurant is an asset in itself. Restaurants become famous for being impossible to get a table at. The chef is more respected by his or her peers and the media. Newspapers write articles about the restaurant. The restaurant's cookbook starts selling more copies on Amazon. The chef is invited to an interview on Food Network. None of these things happen if they raise the prices until there's no excess demand.

Ferrari also has a long-standing policy of manufacturing "one fewer car than the market demands."

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

#154

Post by mjn »

potatolicious wrote: post #100
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."

Rational perhaps, but not clear-headed. It assumes that people's dining behavior is a relatively linear, simple relationship heavily based on price, in a perfectly efficient market filled with perfectly efficient agents who have perfect information. This is sort of like estimating the weight of a cow by assuming it's perfect sphere with a radius. But this isn't entirely surprising. It's a common sentiment on Hacker N…

It's a common sentiment on Hacker News, where highly complex markets are reduced to incredibly simple single-variable, Econ-101-stye supply/demand curves.

That's a strange phenomenon I've also noticed, since posters here usually have the opposite instinct in any other field. Most systems end up complex and difficult to model by simple rules, unless you restrict your model to a specific range of parameters or behavioral regime. Do you want to know how increasing or decreasing pressure affects fluid flow? Most knowledgeable people would immediately say that it depends: does the pressure change impact the flow regime? If it stays within a flow regime, there is one answer. But if it changes from laminar to turbulent flow or vice-versa, the answer may differ. What initially seemed like a simple relationship has a confounding factor of macro-scale regime-switching.

But in economics, HNers feel somehow confident just giving a blanket answer without analyzing the situation. Price and demand of restaurants are linearly related; raising minimum wages increases unemployment; etc. Blanket statements they'd never make in an unqualified form in fields they actually know about, somehow become fine in a field they haven't studied. Nobody seems to feel the need to inquire, well, is it a simple relationship, or can changes in a parameter change the operating regime? Very strange.

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

#156

Post by namdnay »

njharman wrote: post #133
namdnay wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scalpers do provide a benefit though: If you have more money than time, scalpers enable you to easily buy the best tickets, those which would probably have been sold out within a few hours if everyone could buy them at the artificially low prices set by the venue.

Speculation is just another word for betting, I don't think that's an inherently bad thing.

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

#157

Post by namdnay »

potatolicious wrote: post #100
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."

Rational perhaps, but not clear-headed. It assumes that people's dining behavior is a relatively linear, simple relationship heavily based on price, in a perfectly efficient market filled with perfectly efficient agents who have perfect information. This is sort of like estimating the weight of a cow by assuming it's perfect sphere with a radius. But this isn't entirely surprising. It's a common sentiment on Hacker N…

I totally agree with you that it's an enormously complex system, but I wonder how risky a tiny bit of experimentation would be. Maybe it's worth upping everything by 1 dollar just to see? That would make a huge difference to profits. But maybe the hip customer base would notice the change and see it as a signal that their eatery has become bourgeois?

I have to disagree with your point 2: The blue-collar working man doesn't want to queue with a bunch of students for half an hour for his food, however authentic it may be.

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

#158

Post by lifeisstillgood »

fusiongyro wrote: post #97
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #36

But surely this is a good thing - people will have to take part in an auction for a table. 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.

It's possible that your patrons are not interested in bidding, or otherwise participating in libertarian economic fetishism.

Have you seen people trying to get in for a top NY restaurant - they will participate in any fetishism :-)

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

#159

Post by AlisdairO »

tome wrote: post #9
lars512 wrote: post #4

Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.

Indeed this I do not understand, nor do I understand why bands sell tickets so cheaply when they can be resold by touts outside the door for many times that price.

Because people aren't generally motivated purely by money? Surely it's not hard to imagine why a band, once they're making enough money, might also want to consider factors like letting in the people who love them the most, regardless of whether they happen to be loaded?

Surely it wouldn't surprise you, for example, if someone accepted a lower salary for a job that they enjoyed more than a better paying job?

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

#160

Post by chrischen »

jlgreco wrote: post #116
amorphid wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Chipotle better than most restaurants.

Enough to bother getting a dinner reservation? I doubt it; I doubt many would do that at all. In some situations corporate fast-food joints do take reservations (White Castle on Valentine's Day evening is the only example I can think of at the moment) but in those situations they are cashing in on people considering it a novelty. The novelty drives demand to levels that it otherwise never achieves. If there were only…

Have you had the McRib? It's in this limbo state of being popular enough to warrant introduction into the McDonald's menu periodically, but not popular enough to be a permanent staple.

Basically people will especially go out and get the McRib when it "comes back" and then get tired of it.

If McDonalds was limited to only one location, there would almost certainly be long lines, waitlists, and reservations. The ubiquity of McDonalds, and the fact that they can meet demand enough so that no one needs to wait more than a few minutes contributes to the luxury of not having to wait for a Big Mac.

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