From the New York Post:
Olive Garden is right to charge $400 for NYE dinner
Why is Olive Garden charging $400 for a meal? Because it’s worth every penny.
If anything, the tickets seem to be a little underpriced: As The Post is reporting, the Olive Garden’s Times Square outlet appears poised to sell out its New Year’s Eve slots at that price. Looks like Olive Garden could have gotten away with even more, judging from the $799 tab at the nearby Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant.
The OG and other restaurants with a view of the Times Square ball drop at midnight — obstructed in the case of the Olive Garden, unobstructed at Gump’s — aren’t charging merely for a meal but for the extremely scarce commodity of experiencing New Year’s Eve at the center of the capital of the world. An Olive Garden dinner on Feb. 26 or July 9 has an entirely different value, which is why it has a very different price.
Like Uber and the airlines and many other businesses (including drivers of New York’s yellow cabs, who commonly switch off their availability lights and negotiate individual fares on New Year’s Eve), Olive Garden uses surge pricing: When lots more people want something that’s severely limited in quantity, prices go way up.
Makes perfect sense - you are getting dinner looking out at Times Square on New Years Evening. Want a cheaper meal, eat a couple blocks away and then walk to Times Square for the celebration.
The author closes with this observation:
If Olive Garden were charging its regular prices for New Year’s Eve in Times Square, it would have sold out long ago. The seats would have been gone in the first few minutes after the restaurant started accepting reservations, meaning the slots would effectively have been distributed randomly, to whoever managed to get through to the reservation desk.
If you think random distribution to the lucky at below-market prices is morally superior to selling to the highest bidder, why not support that in every other area of life? Because then all of life would be a free-for-all. Buying a tube of toothpaste would be like Walmart after they open the doors at midnight for the Black Friday sale. Having prices rise and fall in response to changing demand makes for an orderly society where things go to those who really want something.
Exactly. Look at Argentina where people cannot buy toilet paper because the price has been fixed and it sells out as soon as the government mandated quantity hits the shelves. Central planning never works, free market capitalism does throughout a wide range of conditions.
