“When every seat becomes digital inventory, the restaurant stops behaving like a neighborhood space and starts behaving like a scheduling system,”
That piece of hand-waving makes no specific sense though.
When doctors' and dentists' offices started encouraging patients to schedule themselves online, what did that have to do with the actual experience of my neighborhood doctor or dentist visit?
Did using StubHub to purchase the tickets to tonight's White Sox game somehow degrade the experience for my son and his buddy, compared to when my father took me by going to a physical box office to buy the tickets?
Walk in and get a table, or call and wait for the right staffer to come to the phone to take a reservation, or book yourself into one online, or send a carrier pigeon if you want to -- whatever. Has diddly to do with the quality of the experience of sitting down in that restaurant and having a meal.
Abi Olvera is raining on my car-hating, cars-are-unaffordable parade, but the arguments are interesting and correct. As much as car dependence is an acute stress on household finance, this piece adds some needed nuance. Americans make car dependence and car ownership worse than it needs to be.
Having purchased my own first used car with my own money in 1986, and my first new one a few years later, suuuure don't want to go back to how those things were done then. Very glad my adult son has had way better options...CarMax and its competitors are a freaking miracle.
“When every seat becomes digital inventory, the restaurant stops behaving like a neighborhood space and starts behaving like a scheduling system,”
That piece of hand-waving makes no specific sense though.
When doctors' and dentists' offices started encouraging patients to schedule themselves online, what did that have to do with the actual experience of my neighborhood doctor or dentist visit?
Did using StubHub to purchase the tickets to tonight's White Sox game somehow degrade the experience for my son and his buddy, compared to when my father took me by going to a physical box office to buy the tickets?
Walk in and get a table, or call and wait for the right staffer to come to the phone to take a reservation, or book yourself into one online, or send a carrier pigeon if you want to -- whatever. Has diddly to do with the quality of the experience of sitting down in that restaurant and having a meal.
Abi Olvera is raining on my car-hating, cars-are-unaffordable parade, but the arguments are interesting and correct. As much as car dependence is an acute stress on household finance, this piece adds some needed nuance. Americans make car dependence and car ownership worse than it needs to be.
Having purchased my own first used car with my own money in 1986, and my first new one a few years later, suuuure don't want to go back to how those things were done then. Very glad my adult son has had way better options...CarMax and its competitors are a freaking miracle.