Meanwhile, anyone that cares about this can still delegate it to a human. Call the Amex concierge, "can you get me into FooBar at around 7PM any night next week" and they take care of it. The phone adds no fairness; it opens up a way for middlemen to offer a service that you pay for but that the restaurant never sees.

While maybe a rare situation, software to handle reservations is a great idea. You instantly save one employee's worth of work for a tiny amount of money.

The other option is to only take walk-ins, but then you risk having empty tables when people are tired of waiting in line. I am sure many places have tried walk-in only, only to be disappointed about not making enough money. Restaurants like reservations.

As a customer, I see exactly what all my options are, immediately, and can easily switch days to see what else is available. Needing to manually tell a human what I'm looking for (which I might not even know yet, without seeing all the options), and have them read something off a screen or book to me, is a waste of time.

And for the restaurants, they don't have to pay someone to answer the reservations phone number when they're not open. And they don't have to distract staff from their hospitality duties when the restaurant is open. Also I'm sure all of us have called a restaurant while they're busy, and have had to repeat what we've said to busy, overworked restaurant staff member who can barely hear us on the phone over the din of the restaurant behind them.

This is the identical to early perspective on the secondary market in event ticketing: a sale is a sale, our work is done.

That means the restaurant is undercharging.

Then you realize how much money you are losing to arbitrage and the work begins.

A couple of decades later, you have variable pricing, dynamic pricing, distribution to expedia, official secondary market partnerships, conferences, niche-y saas products, competing enterprise products, revenue managers, specialized masters' degrees, papers at INFORMs, revenue directors, VPs of sales and revenue,

and a bunch of people who just want to cook and eat

- distribution to ~expedia~ booking (opentable)

- conferences

- niche-y saas products (resy, tock, opentable, etc)

- VPs of sales and revenue (at big restaurant groups)

For restaurants, the complexity they're adding is fairness. They don't want to only cook for rich people, they want to cook for everyone. But their food is so good that if you sorted the net worth of every customer every night descending and invited customers in in that order, there would never be a person in the restaurant with less than 100 million dollars. So, to ensure that net worth isn't a factor on who gets admitted, they have to add operational complexity, basically distributing tickets by random lottery and ensuring that people can't sell those tickets.

The current system is basically a competitive auction with extra steps. The competitive auction ensures that only the people with the most money can eat at your restaurant. If you are a restaurant and you don't like that, then there is no choice but to move to a different system. If you're fine with it, keep doing what you're doing. Many restaurants already do that and they are full every single night.

Ask them to check out with the same credit card at the end of their meal.

Blacklist any card used for a reservation consistently not matched. Cancel all their RSVPs.

We don't care about the odd reservation where someone books and someone else pays - that's rare and individual people don't book that many reservations. Worst case they call support and you set a note to not apply the rule to them.

This means scalpers now need to rotate cards. That sucks and is going to hit other limitations.

Even if the scammer rotates a new virtual number each time, the high number of cancelations on them is enough to trigger inspection and a personal ban (since they still need their name/address on all the virtual numbers).

Since restaurant patrons aren't avoiding restaurants due to terrorism concerns, there would be no need for a security check. Revenue management is, however, broken. (You can't eat at your neighborhood restaurant anymore because tourists are buying all the seats from a bot.) So that's why the ID check is necessary.

I'm not saying that restaurants should do this, I'm just proposing a system that would actually work. Most likely, nobody really wants to solve this problem; huge banks like Amex can extract an extra $700 a year from people that care.

Remember, the goal of this process is to add artificial fairness. The people with the most money are the ones least likely to like this system; they LOSE benefits under this system, as the current system meets all of their needs. They can eat anywhere they want, whenever they want. That is why they would get angry and storm out. Some would argue the whole idea is to make them angry and storm out, so that people that live in the neighborhood can eat there once in a while. Or, so that the restaurant can take the revenue that scalpers currently take.

Nobody is going to go through all the effort of getting a reservation, traveling to a restaurant, getting to the front desk, and then storm out and ruin their entire dinner plans on principle just because they were asked for ID.

> I wouldn't be surprised if most don't even carry it around with them.

I highly doubt that people are bringing their credit card but not their driver's license when going to a restaurant. Why you think anyone would arrive with a means of payment but not a 10 gram ID card is beyond me.