Restaurants these days are having to find more and more ingenious ways to turn a profit. Due to soaring food costs, increased competition, boom-and-bust society, capricious eating trends and that most wily, unpredictable beast of all - the customer - they are always on the lookout, naturally, for the failsafe method of putting bums on seats.
Now one restaurateur, a former trader, natch, and part-owner of Alinea in Chicago, one of the top 10 places to eat in the UNIVERSE (according to someone really important) thinks he has come up with the answer. Nick Kokonas has reduced no-shows at his various US restaurants and bars from 8% to 1.5% by the fiendishly simple method of selling non-refundable "tickets" to his tables at specific times: If you don't show, you still pay, so in effect his loss is actually zero, given they've paid already.
With no-shows accounting for 5%-20% of bookings, it's a genuine and frustrating problem for restaurants, particularly small independents. If you're a big chain, you can probably re-fill seats quickly with walk-in trade and no-one's any worse off, but for smaller restaurants who depend on customers to be faithful to their word and show up for a table they have booked, it's not so easy to turn it into a profit for that night and often means a loss for the business. Many restaurants are now using social media as part of their weaponry, naming and shaming no-shows who can ruin a business with their carelessness.
Now, from a customer's perspective this sounds like a bit of a swizz. Sure, we should never ever make a reservation we don't intend to keep - and this system is designed to keep that malignant impulse severely in check - but there can be circumstances that genuinely prevent people turning up at the last moment to a much-planned, anticipated, saved-for meal out and to penalise sounds incredibly harsh. Manners are everything. No-one is going to object if you have the decency to phone in advance to cancel the booking, but it seems this system may not take that into account. The tip of the iceberg has been the taking of credit card details when you book, an irritation most of us have learned to live with if you look at it from the restaurant's point of view, although the aspersion-casting upon your character is still something that grates.
You might think (at least the eagle-eyed amongst you might) that if it's just in the US, what's the problem? But Kokonas has now sold his software to three secret (why?) UK restaurants so the system is spilling out over here too and it's one to be wary of. It's great news for restaurants and one that at least ensures that smaller enterprises don't get shafted by thoughtlessness, but it's not beyond imagining that larger, more well-known restaurants with salivating waiting lists to fill no-show tables could utilise the software to doubly-, even triply-profit from one table in one evening whilst not actually making the food.... Makes queuing for a no-bookings-policy joint seem quite attractive, no?
