I have a lot of mixed feelings about this.
A restaurant reservation should be an asset, and restaurants should be able to profit from pricing movements with the guests who took the risk of buying the asset earlier.
You should pay your reservation in full with no cancellations. You take the risk of owning an asset with an expiration date, and you should have the power to trade your asset with a commission to the restaurant if you sell it at a higher price.
Restaurants should not lose anything if the price trades down because they make business commitments based on that, such as pre-ordering ingredients, planning staff, etc.
Restaurants should sell reservation blocks in auctions, get reservation companies bidding over them, and be reservation service agnostic so that the same restaurant can be on multiple platforms.
Restaurants that can sell out their reservations in advance are derisking their business, and any additional pricing movement becomes pure net profit.
We can only change this industry with a better understanding of the asset's value, which is access, not food — it's identity, not nutrition.
This is very specific to restaurants that operate on reservations rather than the industry.
This won't ever happen because restaurants' emotional ground is generosity, which is how hospitality is described in the dictionary. The expectation is that they give more than they take, and its fragile state is part of the lure.
We're culturally broken for not accepting restaurants as businesses, for not treating them as businesses, for wanting them to be our friends to give us things for free and a business to take from them.
We don't deserve restaurants.
https://lnkd.in/eQuqrfKy
