Non-paywalled
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/restaurant-reservation-scalping-could-become-illegal-in-california/ar-AA1A0wse
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This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion here, but I don’t support this bill, at least as currently written.
I see a decent argument for banning the for profit resale of “free” reservations, particularly those without cancelation/no-show penalties. There is material harm to restaurants when free tables are left empty, including due to reservation scalpers that fail to resell a reservation, and in these cases a theoretical reservation scalper would have no “skin in the game”.
However, I feel very strongly that prepaid reservations should be freely resalable, or at least not prohibited by law. There is absolutely no material harm to the restaurant if Person A or Person B shows up. They have already received the money for the reservation. If you pay for something, you should be able to resell it at any price (whether above OR below the original price), full stop.
If scalpers are reselling prepaid reservations for way above the original price, and a restaurant is vehemently opposed to that, then there are two great solutions which do not involve unnecessary and heavy handed government regulation:
(a) The restaurant can require the original purchaser to attend by checking ID - as Hayato has started doing
or
(b) The restaurant can raise prices and pocket the extra money themselves
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I don’t think the proposed bill is heavy-handed regulation. If a scalper site or app is selling prepaid reservations without permission but no one’s unhappy, nothing will happen. If they have permission, the law wouldn’t apply. The bill says nothing about sales outside of third-party reservation services.
It is still making such a thing illegal, regardless of whether someone is unhappy or not.
It’s only illegal if it’s a web site or app reselling without permission. I see no reason that should be legal. It’s a fundamentally antisocial business getting in between restaurants and their customers.
The history of our country has been a continuous struggle to overturn laws prohibiting, or pass laws protecting, behavior that at one point was viewed as antisocial.
Let’s legislate based on actual harm (murder, theft, sexual assault) and not “antisocial behavior”.
IMO there’s a reasonable argument for reselling if you’re talking pre-paid, non-refundable reservations in the same way concert tickets are. Very, very few restaurants operate their reservation policy like that because it is so restrictive. I actually can’t think of one in LA off the top of my head. Outside of that I don’t think restaurants should need to tailor their reservation policy to prevent undesired reselling. It creates a bad experience for normal diners, in that they may have to pay unnecessary fees or be inconvenienced by policies that are primarily intended to deter reselling. It also suppresses demand from people who might dine at the restaurant, but don’t want to deal with all the restrictions. Restaurants already have to do enough of this to deter no-shows from conventionally flaky diners.
IMO even pre-paid, refundable reservations shouldn’t be allowed to resell above the price paid. It creates incentives to buy and hold them if you have enough capital and you can refund them at the last minute which can be extremely harmful to the restaurant’s business.
Practically, outside a literal handful of restaurants in California, changes to the proposed legislation to allow that specific kind of reselling wouldn’t change anything. So I’m not surprised it’s not included. It makes the law more complicated and I doubt there’s enough financial incentive for that small a market to make it worth lobbying for.
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