Our booze does not run 80% margins... more like 70% .... and labor crushes it beyond that. Restaurants are lucky to get 10% margins if you are smart. We do better, but we do tickets!
'3 full time employees answering phones' was your starting point. I assume that a restaurant with more than 5 is rare and a restaurant with less than 1 full time person on the phone is a bad fit.
You are not losing many potential customers under that size and you are not leaving too much on the table with huge customers.
If you were trying to sell a hotel booking software and wanted to target customers from BnB scale to resort scale, you would need some way of charging bigger customers more, even if the marginal cost to you was the same.
I think the point that Patrick is making with the margin on booze is that similarly to restaurant prices, software pricing (like restaurant pricing) is more "made up" than the price of manufactured goods where a 'rational' pricing model like cost plus can be employed. Most costs are fixed rather than marginal so pointing to the marginal cost is almost like saying software shouldn't cost money.
I think you demonstrate that by selling tickets. Instead of charging patrons by what they order, you charge them by when they come. The 'what' pricing was made up and you made up a different pricing that worked better.
Just like using a group on voucher. It feels a bit weird, just leaving at the end of a meal, without having to go to the register.
or walking out of an apple store with an iPad and no bag and no receipt. I enjoy the convenience and green nature of it but feel like a thief sometimes. especially since there is no "checkout register" as everyone can ring you up for the device.
A pretty neat solution would be to put rfid tags on the boxes, and rfid readers (powerful enough to read them) at the doors. When you exit it could check and make sure the given item number was actually purchased by a user.
But yes, I know the feeling.
I wonder if a part of the attraction isn't de-commercializing the experience for the diners? Paying up front, presumably via credit cards, means that the service experience is Uber-smooth. You never have to ask for the check, fumble with cards, or do the who-has-this-one dance with other people at the table. You simply show up, get treated like royalty, and leave when you're ready to.
I feel professionally obligated to quibble at one point:
Most reservation and ticketing systems charge by the number of customer transactions, the number of restaurant admin users, for equipment, or a combination of all three. The more business a restaurant does, the more they end up paying. As a business owner I hate such models. Adding an incremental user on my end costs a software company nothing – especially one that has a cloud based system.
You may discover, in running a software company, that it is really valuable to have the prices which you can charge scale with the success of your users. It's how software companies can bid down their lower-end entry points, since we can't conveniently sell our users alcohol at 80% margins.