1mo ago

The Amish are onto smth

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I'm always impressed by how little understanding businesses have for basic online stuff, even when it's very important to their business.
- I hate the, "make an appointment online!" Button that basically just turns into them calling you instead of you calling them. If I wanted to talk on the phone, I would have called you at my convenience. You calling me is way less convenient. Don't put that I can make an appointment online if I can't
  
  Part of faking it is not wanting to acknowledge that you can't afford a needed service.
  There are services that can manage the database for the calendar, or you can implement your own but there's maintenance and implementation costs.
  A dumb restaurant will put garbage in the way of the customers. A smart restaurant understands a 10k outlay pays for itself after a quarter or two, just from reducing friction for customers.
  
  Most restaurants keep reservations in a $2.75 spiral notebook.
  I doubt an online reservation calendar would be $10k for a single restaurant, but still...the only profit is marginal: the people who eat there who would have without the online calendar, and I doubt it would recoup the costs in a quarter or two. Especially considering that the wealth gap and tech gap mean that the number of people who want to schedule online is inversely related to the people who can afford to eat out a lot.
  
  web service/ hosting, programming labor embedding it in the existing site, graphic design, SAAS fees for other bullshit make up a 10k number, which is probably inflated.
  The recoup assumes an extra 25% tables filled on average, ie 25 tables vs 20 every night for 90 days. If those 5 tables filled brings in 20$ after expenses each you can easily get to 10k.
  A restaurant running closer to capacity is very profitable vs running under capacity.
  
  Part of faking it is not wanting to acknowledge that you can't afford a needed service.
  I googled it before I misremembered: Google offers this as a service built into their maps features and appears not to charge the restaurant for it (could be wrong on that bit)
  Sure, Google is Google, but that's a free option that works and works well on a site people probably already used to find you. Why more business don't bother using Google's map-adjacent features baffles me
  
  that's pretty cool, it's probably a marketing issue on google's part.

29 comments