Should Dinner Reservations Be For Sale?

Julia Moskin mulls over the issue:

Who owns a restaurant reservation? Is it the restaurant, having set aside a table as a courtesy for a particular guest? Is it the guest, who made the reservation and can use it – or not – at will? Or is it the entrepreneur who pays workers to frantically redial reservation lines at the moment when prime tables are made available, snagging them under false names and marking them up for sale?

This is the crux of the restaurant industry’s current debate over selling reservations for cash, a smoldering issue being reignited by mobile apps that do just that.

Tyler Cowen defends the practice:

When restaurants don’t charge for reservations, they tend to hold back tables for regular customers, celebrities, very attractive people and the politically and socially well connected. You might be dying to go to that restaurant for a special birthday or anniversary, but you’ll simply be unable to get in. Money is ultimately a more egalitarian force than privilege, as everyone’s greenbacks are worth the same.

But Marina O’Loughlin is skeptical of its value:

The sell is the promised democratization of a notoriously exclusive system: I have experienced it first-hand, calling and being rejected under an alias, and then getting a warm welcome and prime-time table when I phone back with the name of a well-known pal. … But paying before you even glance at the menu simply provides yet another barrier to entry.

Meanwhile, restauranteur Alex Stupak thinks the issue is a no-brainer:

From my perspective the price that comes with booking the table is simply to discourage a no show. If anyone understands anything about the economics of restaurants they would know that a few tables are the difference between profit and deficit. …

Selling tickets to dinner, as some restaurants have done, and pricing based on time and other factors, are brilliant ideas, and certainly precedented in other industries. If you show up five minutes late for a flight, that plane is gone. People do show up 45 minutes late to reservations and look at us as inhospitable if the table is no longer available. Paying in advance could minimize, if not eliminate, this phenomenon. The trick for restaurateurs, is to become a brand so desirable and unique that people are willing to go down these roads to get in.