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NY governor signs law making the restaurant reservation black market illegal
- Spooky23 2y agoWe have shady middlemen profiteering off of everything. Why is this a bridge too far?
- aomix 2y agoThis is just a highly visible problem. Bots make getting reservations at popular restaurants impossible for normal people. So they aren't necessarily being priced out they're being excluded by not being in the know. Which is frustrating. I'm in the know, thanks to my wife, and we still sometimes need to try for weeks to get a reservation because we refuse to pay on the black market.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoCouldn’t restaurants have required an up front non refundable deposit and required the name of the person eating at the time of making the reservation? Airlines/rental cars/hotels have solved this problem without legislation.
- gnabgib 2y agoThey did that. There was press about -particularly guys- showing up for a reservation with a date and having to use a girl's name (hilarity ensued). (8 points, 2 years ago, no comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793285 .. can't find a related right now, but you can see how when paying $2000 for a reservation you might do that.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIf they didn’t check government issued photo ID, then they really didn’t follow through.
- Spooky23 2y agoI’m not going to have my identity verified to eat dinner. Fuck that noise.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThen don't make a reservation. Go to a restaurant where they don't need that.
- throw10920 2y agoI'm happy to have my identity verified to get a reservation at a nice, popular restaurant without having to pay on the black market, and most of the people I know are the same.
- SR2Z 2y agoYeah, it sounds to me like restaurants really don't mind this black market if it leads to tables getting filled more reliably. If they wanted to end it, it would be straightforward to make the rez nontransferable.
- everforward 2y agoThe people that show up also probably spend more if they paid for the reservation. I’m a little curious why the restaurants don’t just charge more. From my simplistic understanding of economics, this sounds like consumers are willing to pay more for it, but restaurants are letting scalpers eat the excess. There must be a reason, they know the market better than me, just curious what it is.
- onionisafruit 2y agoI’m curious about that too. My speculation is they think there aren’t enough people to fill their dining rooms who are willing to pay that much more. They could probably do something like auctioning off a certain number of last minute reservations, but then they risk looking predatory.
- notahacker 2y agoRestaurants want to be as busy as possible as much as time as possible and to sell as high value produce as possible and tip the waiter well. And to come back when they're not booked up. Scalpers just want to skim a margin off the top at peak time, and don't give a shit whether people think they've overpaid for the experience and end up skipping dessert and ranting about how mediocre it was on social media. Or indeed whether they actually sell all the reservations at all they haven't paid for, especially if the profit maximizing fee is one that leaves it half empty...
- roughly 2y agoThere are five different airlines, five different rental car companies, and five major hotel chains*. There are a million different restaurants, most of whom handle reservations with infrastructure consisting of a phone, a piece of paper, and a pen. * yes, you’re right, there are six. You got me.
- carlosjobim 2y agoSo what? Demand ID from the booker for people on the guest list to be seated. This is a solved problem and something that restaurateurs can fix in less than one second. No need for any legislation, no need for any digital system.
- MiguelX413 2y agoAnd ID is demanded online or by phone how exactly?
- kortilla 2y agoNon sequitur. It requires no technology to check an ID on a reservation
- nradov 2y agoLife pro tip: if you don't have a reservation then just slip the Applebee's hostess $5 and you can get a table.
- in-pursuit 2y agoIt was probably hurting tourism.
- ternnoburn 2y agoThe inverse of your question is "why not do this elsewhere too?"
- passwordoops 2y agoBecause these middlemen don't lead to record highs for investors
- yongjik 2y agoYou have to start somewhere.
- immibis 2y agoThere's not a chance this will be extended to things like airline tickets and healthcare. It starts and ends at restaurant bookings...
- Trasmatta 2y ago"Why fix anything if there are still other things broken"
- WalterBright 2y agoNothing shady about it. It's called "arbitrage".
- throw10920 2y agoWho are you responding to? Your comment is directly attached to the story post.
- jsheroes 2y ago[dead]
- donatj 2y agoThis seems like vastly unnecessary legislation to me. There are far more important issues to worry over, but some politician failed to get a reservation and decided "there aught to be a law".
- Ormus 2y agoSpoken like someone who doesn't live in NYC
- stonogo 2y agoOr someone who has no idea how legislation works. The idea that all the "more important issues" take the same amount of time and effort to tackle is invalid; this is an achievable goal and one relatively easy to gather consensus. The flipside complaint would have been "why are we waiting so long to fix this simple thing." Government can't win.
- zdragnar 2y agoIf the offenders don't even live in New York, or even in the US, the goal hasn't been achieved at all. This is a "we passed something to feel good about ourselves" moment.
- nradov 2y agoFirst world problems. People who live in NYC should quit expecting government to solve every minor inconvenience for them and just go eat at another restaurant. Lots of good restaurants in NYC, and many don't even require reservations.
- bitwalker 2y agoSo the NY government shouldn't be trying to solve problems for NY residents? Make it make sense.
- WalterBright 2y ago
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> Headlines like “I made $70K selling NYC restaurant reservations — and I don’t even live in New York” have become all the more common as the savvy implement bots to (or manually work to) book up several reservations at a time, only to be sold in what’s being referred to as a “black market.” From the linked article: > At Ralph Lauren’s posh Polo Bar, tables have been gulped up by an Ivy League, undergrad math wiz named Alex Eisler. The sophomore at Brown University has made it a business to create phony numbers and emails to snag reservations — and resell them for a healthy profit. So how is New York going to prosecute people like Eisler? I doubt Rhode Island is going to extradite them. What if someone in Canada does the same thing?
- onionisafruit 2y agoIs it’s a felony, Rhode Island is required to extradite. I skimmed the article and I’m not sure if this will be a felony though. Your point stands for international actors.
- alwa 2y agoAre people normally extradited in civil matters? With the penalty being a fine of up to $1000 per violation, plus options for customers to sue individually, wouldn’t it work like any other civil matter? Get a judgment in NY with or without the defendant choosing to show up, come after their assets, that kind of thing? Even if they’re Canadian, presumably they’re accepting money in dollars somewhere along the line, couldn’t a motivated attorney come after that cash flow? https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S9365 https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2023/S9365
- neilv 2y ago> The bill does not target legitimate trading platforms like the members-only Dorsia [...] At least they had fun with the name. (Presumably named after the unobtainable reservation craved by the protagonist in "American Psycho".)
- loloquwowndueo 2y agolol doh aren’t black markets illegal by definition?
- WalterBright 2y agoThe government should stay out of the free market. There's nothing wrong with a market for a scarce commodity. But I wonder why the restaurants themselves don't sell the reservations. They're leaving cash on the table!
- Nifty3929 2y agoWhat is missed here is that this will create zero additional seats, it just changes the dynamic of how you get one. There might have been an after-market for these reservations where you could buy one if you want to. But now what? I guess it's just a race to call the restaurant? Or to reload their reservations page over and over again on the day they open them for the day you want? If I want to eat a Fancy Restaurant, but they are normally fully booked - what do I do now? The folks that resell reservations like this are addressing an actual problem in the market. Perhaps you do not like that they are earning money doing so, but preventing it doesn't fix the problem either.
- Retric 2y agoBy taking up reservations that they may not sell, they make the problem worse and obscure what’s going on while costing restaurants business. By extracting money from customers they people off of fine dining, which makes running restaurants harder. Not a lot but every 0.1% matters in such a competitive industry.
- WalterBright 2y agoI thought the way people got reservations was to pay the concierge. One way or another, you're going to have to pay to get a reservation at a hot restaurant. It's like under communism, where the price of bread was set by the state. The result was shortages. So the real "price" a customer would pay was how long they were willing to wait in line. Customers would then pay other people to stand in line for them. It's not possible for government to legislate away the price.
- nradov 2y agoWhat you do now is go eat at a different restaurant. Lots of good ones out there. I can't understand why any customer would be stupid enough to put up with that much hassle and expense just to eat at one particular popular restaurant. And if you really like a restaurant enough to eat there all the time and become friendly with the staff then you can always get a reservation.
- volkl48 2y agoTo be a blunt as possible here: Then you don't get to go. I recognize that the particular demographic that this board attracts probably doesn't like that answer. But among the general public, I'd say it's an extremely popular answer - and "addressing a problem in the market" this way looks like yet another way to make society unfair and biased to the rich, and the average person absolutely hates it. Which is why this law will have broad popular support.
- deadbabe 2y agoWhy doesn’t someone create some kind of app that lets people use their own bots to grab reservations?
- Footnote7341 2y agoScalping is good and there is no such thing as a distorted price.