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Comment by justinlkarr | Hacker News Reader

Overall, I don't think the restaurants have a particularly strong incentive to solve this problem.

This is the identical to early perspective on the secondary market in event ticketing: a sale is a sale, our work is done.

That means the restaurant is undercharging.

Then you realize how much money you are losing to arbitrage and the work begins.

A couple of decades later, you have variable pricing, dynamic pricing, distribution to expedia, official secondary market partnerships, conferences, niche-y saas products, competing enterprise products, revenue managers, specialized masters' degrees, papers at INFORMs, revenue directors, VPs of sales and revenue,

and a bunch of people who just want to cook and eat

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The complexity is added to achieve a complex goal. In the case of airlines, it's so that you can walk up to the ticket counter 45 minutes before a flight, slap down a wad of cash, and get on that flight... while still ensuring that every plane goes out completely full even when that rare event doesn't happen.

For restaurants, the complexity they're adding is fairness. They don't want to only cook for rich people, they want to cook for everyone. But their food is so good that if you sorted the net worth of every customer every night descending and invited customers in in that order, there would never be a person in the restaurant with less than 100 million dollars. So, to ensure that net worth isn't a factor on who gets admitted, they have to add operational complexity, basically distributing tickets by random lottery and ensuring that people can't sell those tickets.

The current system is basically a competitive auction with extra steps. The competitive auction ensures that only the people with the most money can eat at your restaurant. If you are a restaurant and you don't like that, then there is no choice but to move to a different system. If you're fine with it, keep doing what you're doing. Many restaurants already do that and they are full every single night.

Well we already have:

- distribution to ~expedia~ booking (opentable)

- conferences

- niche-y saas products (resy, tock, opentable, etc)

- VPs of sales and revenue (at big restaurant groups)

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