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Re:Is OpenTable Worth it? by stevenwei on Monday November 15, 2010 @01:36AM (#1905477)
I think people generally underestimate the sales challenges associated with selling tech to restaurants. Restaurant owners are too busy running their restaurants to be looking for this stuff themselves.

That's why Groupon, Yelp, and OpenTable all have massive sales forces dedicated to finding and acquiring new restaurants. This costs money. The same pretty much applies to every other restaurant technology company, ever. (Particularly point of sale companies.)

Re:Is OpenTable Worth it? by smackfu on Monday November 15, 2010 @10:35AM (#1906555)
It's also worth noting that the $10.04 in the article includes a portion of the startup fees. So dropping OpenTable for some new solution wouldn't necessarily make financial sense since you would need to pay the startup fees for the new solution. And retrain your staff, etc.

It's debatable whether the startup fees should be included in the per-table cost anyways, given that is a sunk cost.