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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> But that's a very uneven trust. You can bail with no consequence to you, while the restaurant gets screwed.

Yes, that's true.

> I see no problem in leveling the playing field.

Neither do I. That's why I wrote:

"I get that restaurants have to protect themselves against no-shows, and I have no problem handing over a credit card number so that they can charge a no-show fee."

You are the second person I've had to point this out to. Good grief, doesn't anyone actually read the comments they are responding to (or downvoting)?

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People are calling out that your argument is pointing to the wrong step in the trust interplay. A ticketing system is not at all about a restaurant not trusting you to pay at the end of the meal and 100% about guaranteeing that you'll show up in the first place.

As you say, you're fine with restaurants addressing the reservation trust imbalance, but you apparently don't like the way a ticketing system accomplishes that. Why? Because you don't like the way it feels as an experience?

> Why? Because you don't like the way it feels as an experience?

Yes. Exactly.

Imagine if you took the menu of the French Laundry and served it in a McDonalds. The exact same food. Would you still pay $300 a plate?

If the ticketing system significantly detracts from the experience for you, then you shouldn't eat at those restaurants. That makes sense. But if you're arguing that restaurants that implement a ticketing system lead to a decline in quality or actual dining experience, then you'll have to provide some evidence.

I disagree that restaurants that use a ticketing system lose their incentive to deliver the best experience they can. These aren't one-off encounters. Repeat business, reputation, reviews, and word of mouth are all based on the actual experience. If the food or atmosphere is bad, then a fine dining place won't last, regardless of the payment dynamics they have.

> if you're arguing that restaurants that implement a ticketing system lead to a decline in quality or actual dining experience, then you'll have to provide some evidence.

I am not saying that this has happened, only that the pay-in-full-in-advance model removes one of the incentives that keeps it from happening. It may be that the removal of this incentive won't actually change anything, I don't know.

> These aren't one-off encounters

In the case of high-end restaurants, they often are. Not very many people can afford to be regulars at the French Laundry.

> If the food or atmosphere is bad, then a fine dining place won't last,

Maybe. But at the extreme high end, a restaurant can let things slide and coast on its reputation for a pretty long time.

So what happens in the hypothetical that the food sucks and the bill for $300 comes to you. Do you just not pay?

You are implicitly believing in their reputation by selecting the fine dining establishment. I don't really do fine dining so excuse me if this is ignorant, but it seems to me you don't really have recourse after the fact.

Problem is that there are millions of potential customers all who may or may not be flakes. When business could be make or break by one reservation backing out, they have much more to lose way more often than you having an awful experience at a reputable establishment. Tock makes sense in this scenario but you seem like you're being completely unempathetic to the economics of the situation.

> So what happens in the hypothetical that the food sucks and the bill for $300 comes to you. Do you just not pay?

The one time this actually happened to me we walked out before we actually got any food. But yes, we didn't pay (obviously). If we'd paid ahead it would have been a real problem.

> Problem is that there are millions of potential customers all who may or may not be flakes.

Yes, I understand that, and I am not unsympathetic to the restaurant's need to mitigate this risk somehow. But fobbing 100% of the risk back onto the customer is not the right answer IMHO, and any restaurant that does this is not going to get my business. There are lots of other possibilities (50% up front, no-show fee, reputation tracking) that I would be happy to sign up for, but not that.

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