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There's an app called Dorsia, which lets you purchase seats at sought-after restaurants. The purchase is usually in the form of a per-seat minimum spend. They s
by pradn 3y ago
There's an app called Dorsia, which lets you purchase seats at sought-after restaurants. The purchase is usually in the form of a per-seat minimum spend. They start at $75 per seat, but some go into the hundreds. This app solves a few problems at once: customers get to buy their way out of the seat-scouting process (keenly watching the apps for open reservations, walking in and putting their name on the waitlist, bribing the host, knowing someone with pull, etc), restaurants guarantee some of their seats go to high-spending clients (you could walk out with spending $35 at a good number of these spots), and companies have something to offer to their customers as a perk - Dorsia membership (the fancy gym chain Equinox gives their customers Dorsia access, for example). None of this is democratic, but that's the nature of luxury.
https://www.dorsia.com/ https://www.dorsia.com/
- renewiltord 3y agoThat’s pretty cool. If it were an auction it could do price discovery even better.
- well_actulily 3y agoJesus. Dorsia? On a Friday night?
- jareklupinski 3y agoevery time i heard about this app, i thought it was a prank, because i saw the movie
- pradn 3y agoOk wow, I didn't know the name comes from American Psycho!
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> None of this is democratic, but that's the nature of luxury. What does democracy have to do with allocating a scarce resource?
- kuschku 3y agoWhy should a rich person be able to experience luxury more often than a poor person? Wouldn't it be more fair to allocate the seats randomly between all people that'd like to be there? Allocating a scare resource so that some people can use it multiple times while others can never use it isn't exactly democratic.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoDemocracy is a system of governance, attempting to use votes to provide equal representation to people. The mechanism for allocating resources is a different topic, as is determining what is and is not “fair”. >Why should a rich person be able to experience luxury more often than a poor person? Because that is the benefit of being rich. Perhaps this question is better phrased as “Why should there be a wealth/income gap greater than <$x>?”
- jmye 3y agoWhy should everyone have perfectly equal access to non-necessities? What, specifically, is “democratic” about making sure poor people can also get reservations at restaurants? Should everything in limited quantity be given away in a pure lottery?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 3y agoBy what measure do you or I deserve more than poor people? Every society has some measure for who deserves more and who deserves less. The Nazis determined it by ethnicity. Other societies determined it by whether you were born into noble families. Our society today determines it by wealth, which in the end is just a proxy for ancestry and luck. A truly fair system would allocate resources only based on factors entirely under your own control. It's not fair if you're punished for being born into the wrong family. It follows that using wealth as a measure is definitely a bad choice.
- paxys 3y agoDorsia is fine for what it is, but doesn't really solve the problem at hand. High rollers can always find a reservation regardless of scarcity, and similar services like Amex Concierge have existed for a long time now. Restaurants however also have to care about the other 99% of their clientele.
- brewdad 3y agoKaan, in Portland, won a bunch of restaurant of the year awards and became overwhelmed with out of towners trying to book the place up. The owners recognized that to stay open long term, once the hype dies down, they need locals able to get in the door too. They have started experimenting with crossovers where if you buy a lunch at a neighboring business on a certain day, you can jump the line for reservations at Kaan a month or two later. They also played with people who dine at their bar can get restaurant bookings early. It’s only been a couple of months but they’ve seen success in filling the in demand seats with a mix of locals and big spenders from out of town.
- steveBK123 3y agoMaybe the market bifurcates into this willing to pay in money for tables like this vs those willing to pay in time (waitlist, walk in and convoluted reservation systems with small windows).