The peak/off-peak pricing model, coming soon to a restaurant near you: Grant Achatz, of Chicago’s Alinea, plans to open a new restaurant with a unique pricing model. “Ticket price will depend on which seating you buy – Saturday at 8 PM will be more expensive than Wednesday at 9:30 PM,” says the restaurant’s website. “This will allow us to offer an amazing experience at a very reasonable price. We will also offer an annual subscription to all four menus at a discount with preferred seating.” Readers, what do you think will happen? (HT:?Brian LaFlamme)?[%comments]
What’s a Saturday Night Reservation Worth?
TAGS: food
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For foodies, perhaps. For the rest of us, I don’t want to pay a premium because I’m eating out on a Saturday night. Not when there are a thousand other restaurants without all the hoop jumping.
If that’s where I can avoid three hour wait (which is kind of the norm around Alston MA, with all the colleges around) at a reasonable price, I would definitely try it out. But at the end of the day, it’s the food that must do the talking.
As an economics graduate student and a former waiter, I believe this is a fantastic business model for more elite restaurants to adopt. Restaurants already function as some of the most purely competitive and efficient businesses in the US economy. Competition is absolutely cutthroat with the vast majority of start-ups destined to fail. This idea merely seems like an acknowledgment of the free market, competitive nature of the business – competition for customers, for good employees, for profits, etc. Why not embrace a more efficient mechanism for increasing sales volume? It seems like a great idea that will likely allow this restaurant to reduce its spending on advertising and gimmicks.
As an amusing aside, it might interest some to know that waiters often monetize their shifts and trade them in restaurant wide markets. I would frequently sell Saturday evening shifts to my co-workers for as much as twenty or thirty dollars – just to allow them to work my shift. Conversely, I would frequently purchase prime shifts if I didn’t already have them. I can imagine a restaurant adopting this new pricing model will necessitate an even more sophisticated marketplace for shifts among the waitstaff at this new restaurant.
For Sat Night Reservation,
It can increase the income of the restaurant at both sat night and other period. The one who are willing to reserve would be more willing to pay and thus they restaurant can capture more. For those who are not willing to pay, they would go to the restaurant on weekdays. As it would be relatively cheaper compare with sat, the demand of the restaurant would increase and this policy could increase their income.
For the annual subscription, it could help the restaurant to prepare for food and can adjust the supply and cost easier
Best of luck. This reader guesses he will bump into resistance by people instinctively thinking they are getting a bad deal.
It would be a better world if everything could be allocated by demand pricing; every time I see a queue I see a market failure.
Is this really all that different from having a cheaper lunch menu than the dinner menu? Most restaurants do that already, because they’re not as busy at lunch.
If they can get away with it being tendy/fashionable, it may actually increase business as they’ve become more exclusive. If they can’t pick up that kind of status, I’d predict failure as people balk at the cost.
I like the idea because I’m cheap and could wait until 4 AM on a Monday to eat dinner.