It looks like the airline experience you know and hate may be coming to a restaurant near you soon. A new app called Tablz, which is being used by a handful of well-known eateries in the US, lets you pay extra to choose your table at a restaurant. Want a window seat? Well, everyone else wants it too, buddy, so you’d better pay up! How much depends on how many other people are interested: as with ride-sharing apps, prices on Tablz surge with demand.
“The restaurant financial model is broken,” the Tablz co-founder Frazer Nagy told Fast Company. “You can upgrade your hotel room, your car rental … seats on a plane. Every other industry has figured out pricing through upgrades, except restaurants.”
That’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that we live in a world where anything that can possibly be monetised will be monetised. Air travel is the most obvious example. Want to check baggage? That’ll cost you. Want a faster security line? That’ll cost you. Want to choose your seat? That’ll cost you. Want to use the bathroom? Well, that’s still free now, but if Ryanair had its way, it would cost you.
Add-ons aren’t always bad. I don’t mind being in zone nine and boarding a plane last if it saves me money. Increasingly, though, it feels as if you’re expected to pay through the nose for the worst possible experience and then fork out extra to be recognised as a human being. The customer is king? Only if you’re paying for the royal treatment. Otherwise you’re a lowly serf who can suffer.
While we’re all used to being mercilessly divided into castes at the airport, socioeconomic stratification has crept into almost every experience – including, it seems, restaurant seating. Tablz is the latest example of what the reporter Nelson D Schwartz called “the velvet-rope economy”. Pay enough money and you can skip to the front of the line everywhere from amusement parks to hospitals. During the early days of the pandemic, for example, some wealthy Americans spent $40,000 a year for a concierge doctor, which gave them access to Covid tests that were out of the reach of even middle-class Americans with decent health insurance.
Money has always allowed people to buy comfort and bypass inconvenience. Still, it is striking how so much of daily life is now divided into very conspicuous class tiers. Along with healthcare, the most jarring example of the velvet-rope economy is probably those new apartment blocks that have “poor doors”: separate entrances and facilities for the handful of affordable units that allow developers to scoop up government subsidies for their luxury building. It’s in-your-face segregation. One resident told the Daily Mirror she has “never felt poorer in my life because of the way we’re kept apart”.
This sort of socioeconomic segregation can have lifelong ramifications. A recent analysis of billions of Facebook connections suggests childhood friendships between rich kids and poor kids is linked to increased earnings later in life for poor children.
It’s not good for anyone when inequality is rubbed in your face. Again, just look at flying. Boarding a plane often feels like a microcosm of class divisions: you walk through the opulence of business class to get to your cramped little seat at the back. It’s infuriating! And it can make us very angry indeed. A 2016 study found economy-class passengers were almost four times as likely to get air rage if there was a first-class section on the flight.
It’s gonna be great when they replicate that in restaurants! They lead you past the premium seats other punters have paid for to your table by the toilets. “Salt is extra!” the waiter says as they sashay away.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
