A New App Lets You Scalp Your Dinner Reservations. That's a Problem.
For as long as Craigslist has existed, the shady backdoor dealings of our local economy — dubious rental propositions, scalped tickets, spots in line for the iPad 2 — have been relegated there. But now, if a new service for reservation scalping catches on, these questionable transactions could be coming to a phone near you.
A new iOS app called Shout allows anyone in Manhattan to sell a show, movie, or dinner reservation to those willing to pay for them. Essentially, it creates a free marketplace for the crème de la crème of New York’s dining and entertainment industry. So anyone who’s willing to pay, say, $30 for a four-person reservation at Per Se, or even a prime picnic spot at the park, can skip that annoying, pedestrian thing we call waiting.
For the record, Shout, which will graduate from its beta testing soon, says it doesn’t intend for its main business to be centered around reservation bidding in the long run. That is currently what it’s doing, however. And as you might imagine, there are a few concerns about this model.
How, for example, does one confirm that a reservation actually exists and can be transferred? Sites like StubHub have systems in place to transfer the ownership of a planned event’s actual ticket (with actual value). Shout confirms the identity of its users’ transactions, holds money in escrow, and allows buyers and sellers to review each other’s profile pages. But it doesn’t seem to have a way to confirm whether a person selling a reservation didn’t just make it up.
For instance, I inquired about purchasing a spot at a restaurant and asked the seller how I could confirm that the reservation was legitimate. This was the response:
“I actually just emailed Shout because I wasn’t totally sure myself! You pay me and then I’ll give you the name the reservation is under. Shout said that they’ll refund you if the res is fraudulent. But I promise it’s legit :) I just can’t make it anymore.”
It’s also worth considering: What’s to prevent an industrious Shout user from making as many fancy restaurant reservations as possible, posting them on the network, and then raking in the profits? And what happens if no one buys the seats and, as a result, a restaurant ends up empty on a Friday night? Both the businesses and its patrons suffer.
To the company’s credit, this is something Shout hopes to address in future updates.
"We are currently working on various mechanisms to prevent the type of behavior," Shout CEO Zachariah Reitano told Yahoo Tech. "For example, should people be able to post two reservations on the same night? How many reservations should people be able to post in a week? What should be the maximum price of a reservation. We don’t want users to price gouge other users. That is not what Shout is for."
Yes, it’s true that the Le Bernardins and Daniels of the city already offer preferential seating for New York’s elite class. But Shout forces yet another layer of exclusivity to the mix, adding what could very well be a prohibitive cost to an already expensive meal.
Shout’s platform, should it prove successful, could inflate the cost of fine dining in the city, assigning a value and ownership to something that was never supposed to be sold in the first place. The pleasures of the city shouldn’t be set aside for some elite class that can jump to the head of the line just because they make six-figure salaries. Restaurants are free to charge whatever they’d like for the atmosphere, ingredients, and skill that go into a great dining experience. But the buck needs to stop at individuals trading cash for a space they did nothing but make a phone call to reserve.
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