No Reservations

Taking a day off from more serious legal topics, let's consider the trend reported by the New York Times today that an increasing number of restaurants are refusing to take reservations and are seating people on a first come, first served basis.

The Times and some of the restaurateurs involved suggest that the no-reservation system is more "democratic" than taking reservations. That's obviously rubbish. Last time I checked, anyone who was capable of paying for dinner at a restaurant was also capable of making a reservation -- all it takes is a telephone or an Internet connection. Reservations are hardly the preserve of some inaccessible elite.

The message sent by a restaurant that won't take reservations is "we don't give a damn how long you have to wait for a table -- it's no skin off our nose if you have an unpleasant waiting experience." The only thing worse than a restaurant that won't take reservations is a popular restaurant that won't take reservations. A popular pizza restaurant in DC -- I won't mention the name, but it's near the Cathedral -- doesn't take reservations, and while it does have good pizza, if you want to eat that pizza you have to spend at least an hour, usually more, waiting for a table, and that's if you go during the week. I don't go their often.

As the Times points out, taking reservations entails costs, and not taking them also means that customers are likely to spend longer in the restaurant's bar and order more drinks, which are a high markup item. So restaurants are just making money by not taking reservations, at the expense of their customers, who have a less pleasant experience.

If a restaurant usually doesn't have much of a wait for a table, not taking reservations is acceptable. Restaurants that refuse to take reservations and that expect their customers to wait for more than an hour before even sitting down might as well turn themselves into airlines -- the real experts in customer non-appreciation.

Disturbances in the Blogosphere

The FTC recently churned up the blogosphere by releasing new “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” that indicate that bloggers — bloggers! — have a duty clearly and conspicuously to disclose whether they have a “connection,” such as the receipt of free product, with the makers of products that they endorse. (See particularly section 255.5, Example 7.) We thought that we were just posting stuff on our blogs, but suddenly it’s a federal matter.

Like most bloggers, I believe in freedom to blog, but I have to say I think the FTC has a point. The FTC’s statutory mandate is to stamp out “unfair methods of competition . . . , and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” This venerable proscription should apply to new media as well as to old. The Internet is new and cool, but deception over the Internet is still deception. Deception on a blog is still deception.

If you’re representing yourself as a source of unbiased information about consumer products but (to take the simplest case) you’re actually getting paid by someone to say something nice about their products, there’s some deception going on. Whether it’s deceptive not to reveal that you’re reviewing a product that you received for free because you’re known to be an influential reviewer is a closer question. I expect magazine reviewers get free stuff all the time, but they don’t necessarily reveal it conspicuously, precisely because it’s already keyed into our assumptions. If the proscription against deception carries over to new media, the assumptions that mitigate deception should carry over too. So it’s ultimately a question of fact whether people assume bloggers get free stuff. But the basic point that it should be as unlawful to use a blog to deceive as to use anything else for that purpose is sound.

Also churning up the blogosphere is the opposite trend — the consumer use of blogs and other Internet avenues to say not-so-nice things about products and services they received. Usually big corporations have an edge in battles with consumers, but the Internet levels the playing field somewhat in this regard — the manufacturers and service providers have to be concerned about the ability of one dissatisfied consumer to communicate the problem to millions.

Let me join both trends at once. I recently redid my kitchen, and got all-new KitchenAid appliances. I’m sensitive to noise, so I carefully investigated the noise levels of the refrigerator and dishwasher, and they’ve turned out great. (FTC-Recommended Full Disclosure: I didn’t get a dime for saying that but I would be happy to accept an appropriate fee. KitchenAid, call my agent.)

But the oven! Would it even occur to you to check whether an oven might make too much noise, or, indeed, any noise at all? Well, my consumer friend, I want you to know that if you’re thinking of buying a KitchenAid range, you’d better check into it. Every time you switch on the oven (on my model at least), a fan comes on — quite a noisy fan, too, in my (admittedly sensitive) estimation. And it stays on the whole time you’re cooking. The purpose of this fan, I learned from a quite unapologetic KitchenAid representative, is just to cool the range’s electronic instrument panel. There’s progress for you — first they install a souped-up electronic panel you don’t really need (what was wrong with knobs, exactly?), and then they have to add a noisy fan so the panel won’t overheat.

The range had to go. I knew I couldn’t live with that fan noise, so I set out on a search for a range with a quiet oven. But it turns out to be impossible to search, because you can’t listen to ovens in stores — they’re not connected up. And they’re not rated for noise either. There’s no way to tell whether an oven is noisy short of buying it and installing it. After calling every appliance store for 50 miles around, I finally found a knowledgeable salesman who recommended GE Profile, and (after spending just a few hundred bucks to get the countertop reconfigured) I got a GE Profile Double Oven, which, thank goodness, is much, much quieter. So that’s what I recommend.

And I didn’t get a dime for saying that either.

Latest Sign of the Apocalypse

American Airlines will start charging $15 to check your first bag.

The only possible conclusion is that the airlines have determined that our hatred for them has reached some kind of maximum hatred ceiling, so it doesn't matter what they do anymore. There's only so much hatred a person can have for a business. The airlines long ago replaced the phone company as the businesses everyone loves to hate, and what with the delays, the lying about the delays, the lost luggage, the treating us like cattle (actually I expect cattle get treated better), the humiliating boarding experience, the fuel surcharges, and everything else they've done to us, they figure they can do anything now, and it won't make a difference to how we feel.

What's next? Soon the basic fare won't include a seat. It's already true that JetBlue told a passenger he had to sit in the toilet for three hours on a transcontinental flight. Obviously he didn't pay the seat surcharge. Soon the basic fare will entitle you to fly in the cargo hold -- a seat will be $17 extra. (And if you want a cushion on that seat instead of bare metal, it's another $6.)

And speaking of toilets, do you really expect toilets on airplanes to be free forever? There are such things as pay toilets, you know. Are you saying that you're too cheap to pay $1 to use the toilet? Obviously you have a spoiled entitlement mentality.

I think everyone knows that airfares have to go up with oil hitting a record high every day (remember when we used to fear that $70 a barrel oil would hurt the economy?). But everyone also sees that the airlines are raising fares in the slimiest, weaseliest, most deceptive possible ways. People want to comparison shop, and you can't do it if you can't find honest fares. If the airline ad says that the fare is $200, you want to pay $200, not $200 plus a $20 fuel surchage plus $30 to check your bag (I presume it's $15 each way on a round trip ticket) and a $10 security fee. That's an extra 30% of the ticket price. You can't comparison shop if 30% of the is hidden.

Airlines, we're not fooled. And we're keeping a special hatred reserve for whatever you haul out next.

Your Purchase Is Free

No legal content today, but can I just ask when it was decreed that every retail lunch shop has to have a sign saying, "If I fail to give you a receipt, your purchase is free!"? When was the last time you needed to prove that you owned your lunch? I suppose one customer in fifty gets reimbursed. Let that one customer ask for a receipt. I came to buy a sandwich, not a piece of paper.

What's particularly annoying is that the cashiers have become adept at handing you first the dollar-bills part of your change, then the receipt, and then the coins on top, so that the receipt is sandwiched in the middle and hard to get rid of.

I think we all know that stores don't do this out of concern for the customers. It's to make sure the cashiers don't put the money in their pockets. To save stores from pilfering, we're all walking around with bits of paper we don't want.