My friends actually had a startup that did exactly this and had pretty great initial success. Restaurants could pick how much they charged for reservations, wh

My friends actually had a startup that did exactly this and had pretty great initial success. Restaurants could pick how much they charged for reservations, whether that cost could be applied to a portion of the bill, or whether it was a straight up auction for spots. They thought there would be pushback from customers, but the customer feedback was excellent. The friction mostly came from the restaurants. They either had antiquated reservation systems (many on pen and paper) and didn't like the idea of letting software control their table planning (since free reservations could be cancelled on the spot on the whim by the serving staff but cancelling a paid slot really irked everyone). Or poor accounting practices that made it really hard for them to accept that a customer already prepaid $500 for a meal in another system that'll all be bundled in a big check later. Or that they couldn't be sketchy about customer tips if it's being tracked. It was also difficult to scale the business quickly because every restaurant had to be trained and onboarded individually, and every restaurant had an unicorn of an operation that the software had to be able to handle.