There's something frustrating about reading this. Perhaps its that a technological advancement that was supposed to make life easier is being capitalized on by a small group of technically competent people, shutting out the average user.
I was thinking of going to PAX next year a few hours ago and decided to do a bit of research. For this year, the 4 day tickets apparently sold out in 23 minutes, and the rest within 5 hours. I'm having a hard time imagining how its going to be possible for anyone to get some this coming year without a bot.
Ultimately this is not about technology, it's about economics. Surely the restaurant should raise their prices until not enough people want to book 2 months in advance to make bots and make this an issue. Or PAX should raise their prices so they don't sell out in 23 minutes but still sell all their tickets before the show. Or either business should increase their capacity. Or perhaps they are capitalising on the fact that they are oversubscribed as some kind of marketing device. Either way, any time there is a limited supply of something people are going to figure out ways to get some, and if the limited supply is available on the web, people who understand the web will have an advantage.
For example: PAX is trying to build a community event. The target demographic is not "wealthy people who love games", it's "people who love games" Changing the price results in a different convention.
Similarly, a popular $20 restaurant can't double their prices to keep demand manageable, because a great $20 dinner that costs $40 will reduce the perceived quality of the restaurant.
A better solution would be to charge for making a reservation, and give that charge back as a credit against the meal. You don't have to raise prices, you increase the probability that someone making a reservation intends to show up, and when you have a no-show, you get compensated for the empty table (and can still give it to a walk-in.)
Restaurants like State Bird are a bit of a poor example, anyway. Regardless of their reservation book they're going to fill all their tables every night anyway right now, and they don't particularly want larger (5+) parties anyway because they're tiny. I think they want prices low enough that they can establish a loyal clientele that will keep them going once they're no longer the "hot spot" in SF. Or maybe (gasp) they like offering their food to a broader range of customers. Chefs tend to be a little more down-to-earth.
Kid Rock Takes On The Scalpers
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episode-...
Summary
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...
1) More shows.
2) Beat the scalpers at their own game.
3) Go paperless.
4) Don't sell the first two rows.One way to stop that: Raise ticket prices. If Kid Rock charged more for his tickets, scalpers wouldn't be able to sell them at such a big markup.
But Kid Rock doesn't want to raise prices.
"I don't want to break you by coming to see me, " he says. "I want to make as much money as I can, but I don't need to drive around in a tinted down Rolls-Royce or Maybach and hide from people because I felt like I ripped them off."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...
Surely it wouldn't surprise you, for example, if someone accepted a lower salary for a job that they enjoyed more than a better paying job?
Find a bigger venue. Open another store.
Maybe they should just deploy to Heroku or Appengine and have them scale to meet their table needs.
Concert tickets are also being bought this way by bots for scalpers.
Ebay sniper bots are commonly used.
High Frequency trading is the high end this.
Perhaps it is unavoidable, perhaps other means for selling things online should be sought out, text messages with semantic replies required or something?
On the topic of scalpers, Louis CK apparently hired [0] scalpers to help build some anti-scalper checks (I assume it is similar to fraud detection rules: multiple purchases from the same IP, out of town billing addresses) that runs on his website where he now sells all of his tickets. If you get flagged by a rule, the ticket goes to will-call, so you have to show ID and the credit card at the event. That small step to prevent it significantly reduces the resale value for a scalper who can't attend the event.
Here's the interesting part: It worked! Roughly 25% of all tickets for major shows fall into the hands of scalpers. On Louis CK's last tour, of all 125k+ tickets he sold, than than 1% were scalped. [1]
What's really terrible about the whole scalping business is that it would be solved, but only by the people who care least: The venue has a perverse incentive allowing scalpers to buy every last ticket they can get their greedy little hands on. As long as a ticket gets sold, they don't care. Screw the fans.
Possibly NSFW language in these links. [0] http://www.wbur.org/npr/162514765/louis-c-k [1] http://boingboing.net/2012/07/06/louis-cks-direct-sales-conc...
Everything I've seen trying to explain the scalping phenomenon appeals to the idea that this is completely backwards from true. Specifically, the theory is that the venue's incentive is to fill seats, which is why tickets are so dramatically underpriced (price too low -> shortage of seats -> all seats get filled -> the act appears to be popular). From the venue's perspective, a seat sold to a scalper is a seat they lose money on and that might not be filled during the performance (since the scalper's incentive is to charge a realistic price), which is a double loss to the venue.
In sum, selling tickets to scalpers gets the venues an amount of money they don't want (they were guaranteed to sell out anyway), in order to generate an effect they don't want (some seats will be empty during the performance). Where's the perverse incentive?
We're in a capitalist system, the price you pay the scalpers is the "real" price of the concert: it's the law of supply-and-demand.
Now, if scalpers win every time, this is an issue with the original ticket sellers, not the scalpers!
If Shell started selling petrol at half standard price and some guy comes round to fill up a tank and then sell it to people at 95% standard price, that's Shell's mistake, not evil behaviour on his part.
The existence of scalpers is curious. Artists could get the money they do. There are reasons why they still exist, one of them being that artists use scalpers to get cash in hand.
There is a really good episode of Planet Money that looks at why there are scalpers, how they work and what can be done by artists if they don't want them to make money:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-rock...
They are speculators. People have instinctive dislike for speculators as they produce nothing and in scalpers case provide no benefit (such as liquidity) to society.
Yeah, playfield got leveled because now everybody and their dog can use snipers (hey, where's the reward for technical competence?). So the "game" looks similar to before automation, but is more complicated. A positive feedback loop of increasing complexity if you like. For me, "the only winning move is not to play". </rant>
This doesn't make sense, really. You enter the price you're willing to pay in an auction; what everyone else bids is irrelevant to you.
If you are getting outbid, it's because someone is willing to spend more money on the item, bot or not. Don't bid low trying to get a deal. Bid what you are willing to pay, and it works every time. It's a very efficient system.
State Bird Provisions however has so much demand that there is a line for walk-ins hoping for a cancellation an hour before the restaurant opens and they appear to not actually hold back much (any?) inventory specifically for walk-ins.
But generally speaking yes, you will often be able to call a restaurant and get a table or possibly walk in even when their online reservation system shows up as full.
Also, you can also put yourself on a waitlist at many restaurants. If someone calls to cancel, before they release the reservation back to the online system, they'll go through their waitlist and call and ask if you want it instead.
hi jordan.
(only works in places where you are a regular and a good tipper)
You can also nook from the phone a couple of days in advance usually.
Everyone else, who has been fighting to get a reservation for months the old fashion way, will not decry your loss.
And I doubt very much you would risk getting blacklisted for sniping reservations off their site, since you appear to love the restaurant so much.
Honestly though, I don't understand why this needs to be available over the web in the first place. If your restaurant is that posh, I'm sure you're not going to lose business by making people call in their reservations. You'll still need to have someone answering the phone anyway, so it's not like you're saving money by cutting an employee. Whatever meaningful benefit having an online reservation system might have provided is clearly lost in the absurdity of this situation.
Want to eat at $POPULARRESTAURANT - you set a bid min and max and off you go.
Its allocating scarce resource at the most efficient level.
And it seems to work.
Places like Burger & Lobster or Meat Liquor usually have very long queues at prime times.
Probably only a matter of time until a side-business of people who are willing to wait in lines for you emerges.
A perceived upshot is that the restaurant must put an emphasis on quality at reasonable prices, otherwise they won't draw those crowds and I'm definitely not going to wait for a crappy meal.
However, the "no reservation" method itself seems to help draw crowds too. Kind of like the lines outside a night club seem to draw people. Throw in a bit of edgy branding with some cool marketing and it pulls well - having an "image" works.
Queuing is a bit of a cultural thing/expectation over here. Having someone cut in line can be a huge no no. If someone bought their way into the queue, I could very well see it causing some highly vocal responses. But I'm sure there are people out there trying it out.
(Why do "suburbanites" seem to get so much stick nowadays?)
I can't think of a worse customer experience than taking someone on a date, waiting in a congested line outside at night for 45 minutes only to be told that there are no tables available.
Not getting a reservation on the other hand just means that I can just go somewhere else.
if this restaurant is so popular, isn't it too mainstream for hipsters? /philosoraptor
Perhaps:
- People in certain modern, urban situations crave certain types of creative expression that seem to be very hard to find in these environments.
- Social patterns place a high value on being seen to have had an experience, that provide a reward similar to being the artist.
- People capable of producing these artistic experiences are initially perhaps not so interested in managing the people who are the recipients of their creativity - they are more interested in creation.
- Once money and/or fame becomes involved, the artists are unlikely to widely share the skills that lead to the creativity arising, are motivated to protect methods of production, fetishize the product and create strong brands.
These factors together create this 'hipster' effect where small points of creativity are heavily focussed on and take a long time to replicate.
I'd hypothesize that this situation would go away if people were broadly connecting with meaningful, personal creative pursuits. Or, if the artists flipped their model once they smelled success and were motivated to share everything they were doing, allowing the experience to be rapidly replicated.
"A hipster is someone who enjoys the things I do, but in ways I disapprove of"
1. Don't take reservations.
My favourite restaurant operates on this basis. On a Friday or Saturday night you will queue for up to an hour for a table. If you prefer to avoid peak hour, there is rarely any queue for lunch. I've eaten there over 100 times and I still don't begrudge the time spent in the queue.
2. Run a lottery
Popular theatrical productions are great at this. If you don't want to book months ahead (or can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars), Book of Mormon offers a ticket lottery before every show. Just show up at the theatre and enter for your chance to win one of 21 discounted, front-row tickets.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that the establishment in the OP wants to let the poor and/or technological illiterate to attend. However other places have managed to do so without hurting their brand.
Also, is scraping legal? I would imagine, at the very least, the OP and others are violating the TOS. I have written a few scripts of my own for fun, but I would be careful about bragging about it on a public blog.
http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2013/07/25/are-automate...
- detect obvious bots (e.g. clients requesting form without loading CSS or JS or filling it in instantly), suspicious IPs (EC2, VPS hosting) and release smaller batch of seats to them (don't deny completely in case of false positive).
- create waiting list and give reservations randomly to people on the list (while the list can be spammed as well, humans would still have better chance than reserving between 4:00:00 and 4:00:01). Also bot authors would have to be creative to avoid creating easy to spot patterns of names/times in the list.
Moreover, I have also participated in a few lotteries for various things (e.g. Half Dome permit), but did that completely by the book.
A few things that help make system fair (TM):
- price them right, maybe even charge a bit premium for reservation vs. walk-ins
- make cancelation non-free and charge at reservation time, even a few dollars prevents spurious reservations "just in case"
- have a waiting list, if there is a cancellation, you can automatically sell it to someone else
- do some load management, e.g. weekend prices, discounts...
Ferrari also has a long-standing policy of manufacturing "one fewer car than the market demands."
All tickets for the year are gone on the first day they become available and then lo and behold you can suddenly buy the tickets (for a considerable markup) elsewhere. The folks scooping up the tickets like this are parasites. The solution is to limit the number of tickets per person or to disallow reselling.
(Haven't tried for a while out of frustration, might be different now)
I know, slightly tangential to the article.
Thing is, is there really that much of an arbitrage opportunity with restaurant reservations? Is there a place I can go purchase restaurant reservations?
If it doesn't matter, they should raise prices.
This is an issue in NYC. Some $300/night restaurants have you hyperclicking the moment the reservations open up.