How I Became the Most Hated Person in San Francisco for a Day

Yes, you say you've started out small, with manual phone usage, etc. But then you go on to say: "So in the interest of ethics and fairness, I want to talk to restaurants about working with them directly on a better reservation system." Sounds like you want to scale it, and make money off of it yourself, after all.

Whereas it seems to me that for high-demand restaurants the manual approach, exists that way because it won't scale. Anyone can get a reservation, if they're willing to wait a few weeks, it doesn't matter what they're willing/able to pay. And once you automate that, how do you keep it from being abused and effectively turning into a sort of demand tax? In which case the restaurant could be pocketing that money themselves by simply making the cost of dining there that high in the first place, but if they didn't, it's probably because they didn't want to restrict so heavily based on spending ability. (Well, and because pricing/markets is tricky, and who knows if it would've been successful initially at a higher price... this part is just speculation on my end.)

What he's doing is basically artificially reducing supply, making it harder to get a 'free' reservation, and then charging for it. Meanwhile, the restaurants may increase their supply of food based on the increased 'reservations', only to have them pulled out at the last second, because I highly doubt he's selling all his reservations.

In the end, everyone will suffer, because once restaurants catch on, they're either going to eliminate reservations altogether, or start charging for reservations themselves. Margins are so thin in restaurants, especially in the high end market, that they'll do anything to stamp out this type of profiteering.

Maybe this has value, is good or bad, whatever: but be clear with restaurants that you're a for-profit scalping business making money off their inventory.

The douchiness of scalping reservations can be argued....

But there is not a single logical defense for LYING to the restaurants about being an individual. Writing a blog post about why you're lying doesn't make it okay, either.

Be clear with businesses about what you're doing with what THEY broke their backs to build, and let them opt in if they want. Cool, could be a good service and help some restaurants out or something.

But stop lying. That is douchey, is unethical in every way with no justification, and is worthy of all negative media — regardless of how overkill SF media can be sometimes.

Stop lying.

As mentioned, scalped tickets, while not the most ethical thing, at least put the listed amount of money into the hands of the artist and incur a financial risk to the scalper. This potentially ties up a bunch of tables that may never earn any income and if I was a restaurant finding myself on this service I would be pretty ticked. The number of people who know to look here for a reservation is minute, let alone willing to pay for that reservation. I'm betting that a high number of those tables sat empty tonight and those restaurants are already out money.

Additionally if the restaurant has done all the work to create such a high demand for their seating, they should be the ones pocketing the profit off of it.

At the end he asks to work with this industry but has already begun screwing them. I'm thinking not the best method to foster co-operation.

That said, having customers have "skin in the game" does add value. But the ethical way to implement this would be to get the restaurants to consent to your system (and maybe get a cut). The value of a paid reservation varies by restaurant, and it should be up to them to decide if it's worth the risk of pissing off customers, not you.

Now here comes a service where the only person benefiting is the middle man. It's worse for the end user, because now they have to pay a fee to get what could've been theirs normally (or at least would've fairly been someone else's that was using it legitimately). It's worse for the provider, because now their user base's spending money has been diminished a little (less for you).

It makes sense that it exists, but it feels like a selfish thing. It's extracting money from a place that has value, but didn't need tapping.

I'd suggest that this is exactly the issue.

As a consumer, I'd hate for this to become a thing. Likely it's only going to work in SF because of the amount of disposable income. In other parts of the world it may work, but I doubt it would become mainstream.

Don't feel bad, this will blow over. Plenty of people have written and developed far more sinister applications that would have a far greater impact, but alas they didn't strike out. Hah, unfortunately for you, you got publicised pretty fast.

Get bent.

- sell tickets instead of taking reservations (Alinea's solution, which saw no-shows drop from 8% to 0.5%; it used to be done in London in the mid 2000s, I remember giving my card details over and over again), although that's less practical for less hot spots, where that's enough friction to switch to a competitor;

- ask for ID or a card to check against the name.

How would you cope if either became common practice in your target markets?

It's the same as people who buy concert or sport tickets simply for the resell. Yes it is done legally, but legality is not the same as ethics.

What I see here is a service that allows people who didn't plan far enough in advance to be able to enjoy an experience at a premium (or maybe a fee/penalty cost) that they otherwise would not have. The customers of this service have already incurred a penalty of sorts.

I don't see this as (yet) an abusive economic system that disgustingly inflates prices in some sort of a monopoly-style hierarchy (which ticket scalping does). There is unprecedented room to badly abuse this system, and I would hate to see that happen.

However, I think what he did should not incite so much hatred. I personally am against this sort of thing but that doesn't mean I am going to spread hate. Ticket scalpers, though...

In another variety, I've seen newspapers/blogs do this sort of advanced-fake-reservations and give them away as prizes. I'm not sure which is worse.

I would hope that restaurants take measures to make these kinds of things difficult to pull off. Maybe assess some additional tip amounts if the reservation name doesn't match anyone in the group, or asking for an ID when they first enter the restaurant (although I think this would be bad customer experience).

There's so much room for abuse with solutions that needlessly disrupt the experience.

If RestaurantHop can prove through the resale of reservations, that there is value in these reservations, value that the restaurants, with a better pricing system, could capture, then I think this is great proof of concept for a new marketplace.

If restaurants have underestimated the value that reservations can capture, they might have just turned RestaurantHop away without a glance, if he had approached them with the idea of ticketing reservations, but now that he has bypassed the restaurants (by calling under a fake name), he proves that the reservations have value.

Now that it's clear that reservations have value, RestaurantHop can be the exclusive destination to purchase reservations for a night at a premium restaurant. Once you make that connection, then pricing strategies can go wild.

Some examples of that -

1. Cheap reservations made in advance. 2. Cheap last minute reservations when the nights are slow. 3. Expensive last minute reservations when the nights are busy. 4. Expensive reservations that require extra care - large groups, special dates, etc.

Here's the thing. I don't go to a place that has a long reservation wait time. Place where they say you need to book months in advance. I simply don't patronize those places. If there was a marketplace for me to evaluate (from Free to Expensive) the cost of making such a reservation for me, I would gladly do that.

I already do that with GoldStar, the ticketing service. Adding premium restaurant reservations to the mix would be great.

So I say, great start. Hustling to cover the reservation marketplace is going to be brutal, and if this takes off, competition is going to be fierce, with essentially no barriers to entry, but if there's an inefficient marketplace out there, that lacks transparency, and favors the connected, then I say -- go for it. Let's see how much money is being left on the table.

(That being said, I think Parking Monkey, or Monkey Park, or Park Monkey, or whatever their name is ... is a true example of JerkTech - stealing from the commons, and extorting value by behaving badly - I didn't like it when guys on the street did it, and I don't like it when an app does it.)

(( you can almost imagine BirthdayinthePark Monkey, or Place ontheBeach Monkey, or SeatontheBart Monkey. All terrible terrible ideas.))

People get outraged over nothing.

The hypocrisy is ridiculous. Instead of getting upset at how restaurants treat their workers, they get mad at some random guy who makes a few reservations at a few restaurants.

He is taking a bad system and trying to make it better.

Restaurants screw people over all the time, managers and owners take advantage of minimum wage and our tipping culture to make sure almost everyone who works at the restaurant are close to or under the poverty line.

You know why people get outraged? Because it is easy and they don't really have to do anything.

On the one hand you could view it as the site being a market maker and injecting liquidity into restaurant reservations. Whether this is ethical or not is up for debate.