Legendary Fried Chicken & Nashville Hot Chicken Hits L.A. - Howlin' Ray's New Restaurant!

TaskRabbit

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Hi @ipsedixit,

Nice! :slight_smile: My friend was joking with us the last visit, saying she’d rather just pay someone $10 - $20 and stand in line, and then you mentioned Task Rabbit! :smile:

That reminded me of the people that used Task Rabbit to hire people to wait in line for Chengdu Taste when it was absurdly crowded early on.

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About how much does a 90 minute taskrabbit wait go for? Between Howlin Rays and the soon-to-be La Barbecue mobs, I’d be inclined to give it a shot.

I would literally use task rabbit for someone to stand in line and then buy it for me and letting me know ETA…while I go sit at a nearby bar and drink a beer.

How much would this run for using task rabbit like this?

We need to know!

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Eff that noise, that just increases the premium on the food. I have no problems passing on it. I’ve had it, I agree it’s good. I don’t begrudge their success. But I’m not standing in line for that long and I have no problems accepting the fact I won’t be eating it anytime soon. I’ll wander off and eat something else. If that makes me a bad foodie, chowhound, FTC, etc, I don’t give a flying eff what people think.

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If that makes me a bad foodie, chowhound, FTC, etc, I don’t give a flying eff what people think.

LMAO

At this rate I’ll probably end up in Nashville.and dine at OG joint before the lines die down to a reasonable sub 30min wait…

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Longest wait for me and my crew, bout 35 minutes. Yesterday about 2:15 I asked folks that I saw on the street that were toting Howlin’ Ray’s bags how long the line was and got a unanimous response of 2 hrs. No hot chicken for me haha!

Why you mad?

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I’m sure they’d be willing to wait at Howlin Rays.

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If you stood in line at Howlin Rays and talked to folks… You will find several of these guys. Taskrabbit… Postmates… The guys hope above all the cost, a nice tip in addition.

–Dommy!

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Nahh, I think it’s stupid but I’m chill. Although I do hate line holder services. I put them in the same category as scalpers. It drives up pricing and makes it harder for the average person to pay an affordable price.

They’re just taking advantage of an existing market inefficiency. Scalpers only exist because ticket sellers are leaving money on the table. I think there’s some historical artifact where musicians were deathly (and irrationally) afraid of having stadiums that weren’t full that’s causing this effect, but it’s not going to change until they start charging more appropriate prices.

Edit: and obviously a similar dynamic applies here. If there’s a 2-hour long line forming for Howin’ Rays, that means that they either need to expand (location, hours, etc) or raise their prices, or both. I hear they’re working on the first.

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How does it drive up pricing for anyone other than the person using the service?

Inflates demand, etc.

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Severely disagree with all this. Most musicians I know hate scalpers because it drives prices up and keeps tickets out of the hands of not wealthy hardcore fans. You see the same effect for sporting events. But this is not the forum for this discussion

And often expansion means a drop in quality. The price increase is not ideal either.

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It does not drive up prices it just makes the line miserably long for humans standing on line for themselves. I don’t think people standing on line are moving the needle for Howlin Rays. It makes much more sense for a sneaker release where people are buying sneakers for $200 and re-listing them on eBay for $1,000. Not so much for a $10 chicken sandwich, even though its a fantastic sandwich.

Musicians are welcome to hate scalpers all they want, but that doesn’t change the economic reality that they’re pricing their product under equilibrium, and the natural consequence of that is that somebody else is going to take advantage. (Also - only some musicians hate them. Many musicians and venues are more than happy to have offloaded that risk onto somebody else.) I couldn’t tell you why they aren’t using many of the extremely trivial ways to eliminate scalping if they hate it so much. If you want to subsidize fans then you’ll have to get clever.

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Again, severely disagree with your points but this is not the forum. Back to food!

looks like task rabbit is $20/hr to wait in line.
Worth it? LOL