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'Surkus' App Pays Users To Line Up Outside New Restaurants (chicagotribune.com)
A new app called Surkus allows restaurants to manufacture their ideal crowd and pay people to stand in place like extras on a movie set. The app reportedly uses "an algorithmic casting agent of sorts" to hand-pick people according to age, location, style and Facebook "likes." All of this is done to create the illusion that a restaurant is busy and worthy of your hard-earned money. Chicago Tribune reports: They may look excited, but that could also be part of the production. Acting disengaged while they idle in line could tarnish their "reputation score," an identifier that influences whether they'll be "cast" again. Nobody is forcing the participants to stay, of course, but if they leave, they won't be paid -- their movements are being tracked with geolocation. Welcome to the new world of "crowdcasting." Surkus raises new questions about the future of advertising and promotion. At a time when it has become commonplace for individuals to broadcast polished versions of their lives on social media, does Surkus give businesses a formidable tool to do the same, renting beautiful people and blending them with advertising in a way that makes reality nearly indiscernible? Or have marketers found a new tool that offers them a far more efficient way to link brands with potential customers, allowing individuals to turn themselves into living extensions of the share economy using a structured, mutually beneficial transaction? The answer depends on whom you ask.
This is going to be hilarious.
If there is a queue at a restaurant, then I certainly wont be going, and anyone joining the queue will either be waiting forever, or have to be told its a fake?
I have to wonder what type of people would be spending their time doing this.
They have enough money for a smartphone, and to look 'smart' in some demographic way, however their time is worthless enough that they can afford to be paid (I assume not much) to stand around doing nothing...
It shouldn't take more than a quick look in the door to see that the place is empty, and yet there is a queue outside ;)
This may work in New Yawk, San Fran, or LA, where people care about getting into the "hottest" restruants and posting social media shit for assholes who care. I live in a normal town, I'll make a reservation for a special occasion. Can't get in, no problemo? I'll just try someone else.
I make a reservation then can't get in (has never happened). You'll get a 0 star rating on yelp.
The app reportedly uses "an algorithmic casting agent of sorts" to hand-pick people
These words do not mean what you think they do.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
If there's one thing I'm 100% sure about the future of advertising and promotion, it's that whatever form it will take, it will still be 100% amoral, just like the present of advertising and promotion.
This new app is a perfect example of this.
A new app called Surkus...
I wonder how much Surkus paid to create the illusion that someone might actually use their app.
Outside of college students, I can't see the appeal for most to commute somewhere to stand outside looking excited for undisclosed minutes (hours?!). And, even for college students, if the location is not conveniently accessible, it will be a pass, too. Wait, is there at least free drinks involved or do the people just mill about staring down at their phones tapping away?
So the company has been pitching this to the press for a bit now. In case anyone is curious, here was the PR pitch.
Despite how TFS put it, this is a lot more than just standing in line for a restaurant. It's about filling clubs and other venues so that people who are going to a party think it's being well-attended because it's popular. Not that bringing people (especially women) into a party to liven it up is new - it's practically as old as time itself - but this has it down to nearly a science. It's really quite creepy.
This reminds me of a movie/TV prop supplier company who rented out cardboard people to fill up theaters and stadiums in the backgrounds. They used roughly 80% cardboard dummies and 20% real people who would move and squirm to make the crowd look alive. (Tell your date you're a "professional squirmer".) The ratio of real people was typically higher near the front (close by) seats.
The cardboard dummies were based on photos of about 25 different people with hand alterations so that duplicates didn't stand out. That way they had fewer batch runs to prepare.
Fairly often some of the human "seat" actors ("extras") would mutilate the dummies out of job security, ripping arms off, drawing black-eyes on them, giving women mustaches, giving men boobs, etc. Thus, the co. had to spend a lot of time repairing them after shoots.
Now they probably use mostly CGI and/or canned footage stitched in via digital motion smoothers etc.
Table-ized A.I.
in other words fucktards under 45 will eat this stupidity up.
It pays to be a social media whore today, so it doesn't surprise me that pimping lies like this is somehow worthwhile.
Why fucking bother getting an education when we value narcissism and bullshit this much.
We didn't need apps to do that. We get a bunch of friends progressively come together to stare at the empty sky showing blank expression, and then random strangers just join in until it became a crowd of people. Afterward, we left making the crowd stares at unknowns.
Same for a line, we get our friends to randomly lineup in a particular place like outside the restroom/water closet/toilet where the door is closed, and make random guys wait behind us patiently.
I could see this working better for a nightclub, where part of the draw is knowing you paid to get into a place that's full of lots of attractive people.
But a restaurant? The new ones that opened out by me and had lines just made me decide to hold off a few days before visiting them. (After all, most new restaurants really don't have their food preparation or service down yet, so you tend to get a less than ideal experience.)
As someone else on here pointed out too; won't people realize something's not quite right if the place isn't totally full on the inside? If I saw a long line and empty tables inside, that would tell me the restaurant is short-handed and service will be really poor. That would make me leave.
If you want to generate a buzz and a big line for the sake of photo ops and media coverage, it's a far better investment to give away free food to people. Krispy Kreme doughnut shops do that all the time when opening new locations. First day, you get a free one with each visit.
if the restaurant isn't good the people won't come back. If they are good and with this also look good, they might get successful a little faster.
Have gnu, will travel.
When I look for a place to eat, I ask my FRIENDS...and by friends I mean those that share my sense of values, not these social media apps, "likes" and what not. A lot of my "good eatin' places" look like dives, ready to fall apart, sometimes you think how the hell did the health department pass this place? Established places. One BBQ place I frequent, has been around since the late 1920's! When I first went there in 1981, they had a few playing cards & dollar bills tacked onto the ceiling tiles. By the early 2000's, they mostly had turned solid black from cigarette smoke (smoking isn't allowed in businesses in our city anymore). Plus, you are likely to see people that appear to be homeless, along with people in suits during the lunch rush. It's a down home place, friendly. Another one is a chili place, been around since the early 50's. Building was made out of an old metal quonset hut. Decorations inside look like something out of a psycho movie. Posters of just about anything, paint splatters all over the place. The chili is purposely spilled over the top of the bowl onto the dish underneath. Owner decades ago had someone thing the bowl wasn't full enough, so he filled it to the top and it spilled over. He then did that on purpose and to this day, if your bowl doesn't have spilled chili, they will fill it. THOSE are the kind of places I like to frequent. You know , the broken neon sign that says "EATS" out of the way hole in the wall places, not the trendy ones where everyone inside isn't talking to each other, but TEXTING each other. You can have those overpriced, over hyped, shallow places...I'll stick with the off the wall hole in the wall places that know how to slap a steak on the grill, fry up a greasy cheeseburger, fat dripping BBQ, stick to your ribs food.
They may look excited, but that could also be part of the production. Acting disengaged while they idle in line could tarnish their "Songbun score," an identifier that influences whether they'll be "cast" again. Nobody is forcing the participants to stay, of course, but if they leave, they won't be paid -- their movements are being tracked with geolocation. Welcome to the new world of "crowdcasting." Workers' Party of Korea raises new questions about the future of advertising and promotion. At a time when it has become commonplace for individuals to broadcast polished versions of their lives on Korean Central TV, does Workers' Party of Korea give businesses a formidable tool to do the same, renting beautiful people and blending them with advertising in a way that makes reality nearly indiscernible? Or have marketers found a new tool that offers them a far more efficient way to link brands with potential customers, allowing individuals to turn themselves into living extensions of the Byungjin economy using a structured, mutually beneficial transaction? The answer depends on whom you ask.
New club opened years ago at my home town... the owner, being a savvy club owner, actually paid hand-picked super-hot girls to come in from the other city centre in the province, hundreds of miles away for the first few weekends, to hang out there and be window dressing. Word spread fast amongst the local young,horny male segment of town that this club was the best place to 'meet girls'. The extra revenue from desperate young guys buying drinks for these girls in a futile hope of taking them home probably made the scheme break even for the talent budget. Brilliant and evil at the same time. Within a few days word got out what was going on, but it remained the biggest 'brand' for a club in the city for years ("Hot girls!" after all...)
Restaurants? That's one of the worst implementations. Nobody wants to wait hours behind fake people for food. Maybe tech shops and clothing stores you can just walk around in...
New restaurant.
Giant sign "grand opening".
Nobody there? Nobody cares.
If people see line around corner, they post on SM "ooh new restaurant line around the block gotta check out #TheInsectEatery"
They don't care about first-day sales, they're buying word-of-mouth advertising through psychological manipulation of social media hipsters.
And I don't give a shit.
"Stupid Americans. I'm doing almost the same thing but with their insipid electoral process and mind-numbing 'social media' and I'm not paying them a Ukrainian dime".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
sure, you might not immediately go in because of the line, but guess what, the line made you *notice a new place*. You make a mental note to check out the place sometime in the future. This thing is genius and now we see why geeks should not start their own business- they just don't get marketing.
I don't know if they have similiar laws for regular businesses, but given how shill bidding is illegal, it sure seems like faking popularity should be illegal as well.
If one RTFAs (yes, I know, this is Slashdot, but one should consider doing it if the summary sounds too far fetched), one gets the impression that the queuing example was made up by the journalist to have something more sensational to write about. Actually the app appears to be about attendance of events.
Let me cite a few other parts of the article:
Surkus members have attended 4,200 events for 750 clients, including big-name brands, hospitality groups, live-ticketed shows, movie castings and everyday people who want to throw a party.
For example: A gaming company throwing a launch party might ask Surkus to find men and women ages 18 to 32 who like comic books, day parties, dance music and the company's product.
Caroline Thompson, 27, a contributing writer for Vice, said she downloaded Surkus and attended an event last year at a Chicago club full of "finance bros" on a Thursday night.
"It was a little weird that probably 80 percent of the women at the club were there because of the app," she said.
They also write that women are typically paid more than men, so we could now start another discussion about equal pay for men and women or conclude that this is mostly an app to fill up some clubs once the "free entry for women" no longer works.
I'm 61 and I eat out +-3 times a week since 21, always in different resp. new restaurants and I never, ever wait in a line.
I always have a reservation, go in and am taken immediately to my table to eat. That's it.
I would never wait for a table when I have a reservation, I just would eat somewhere else, and never go back to that restaurant.
Is this strictly a US thing?
Aren't there enough restaurants?
This seems one of the most profitable business right now. Actually having/knowing doesn't seem to matter anymore. It is everywhere, much more in internet: fake followers ("I follow you if you follow me back" or paid followers, all the same), friends, references (people recommending technical skills in exchange of getting theirs recommended too or stars/likes), knowledge (trying to emulate/steal what other people did without even understanding what you are doing), ideas (let's repeat 1000 times today's trendy whatever without even knowing what we are talking about), even fake feelings (people passing from extremely sad to extremely happy in minutes; or feeling attacked by non-existent meanings, even just by being proven wrong), etc.
I honestly don't get it: why making any effort to be part of nothing? To be liked by those with so worthless opinions? I prefer to be honest and fair, to have actual knowledge/learn/improve/accept my errors, to trust what is trustworthy and like what is likeable. I am not precisely too young (close to my 40s already!), but am forward-thinking (leftist, in case you are interested), adaptable and innovation-prone; I am not the kind of guy who is always remembering the good old days. But I am not liking at all what I am seeing lately (e.g., internet, software/programming knowledge, extremely stupid investments, Hollywood, generic expectations, etc.): there is a systematic promotion of mediocrity, dishonesty, unfair impositions (trolling, unmotivatedly censoring anyone thinking even slightly differently, ignoring those not blindly accepting whatever half truth), also known as stupidity.
For anyone interested: I prefer to be alone, poor and ignored than participating in that circus of emptiness. I will continue (even more now than before) being completely honest, fair and only showing what I truly have/know; saying "I like" to what I really like while I am liking it; not being afraid of random crazy misinterpretations of each single word I say. I will not tolerate any unjust imposition or any other output of this dictatorship of appearances/ignorance.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
When the news start to sound like a Black Mirror script, you know progress has taken a wrong turn.
Paying people to attend a candidate's rally so that the media can report that the candidate attracted standing room only crowds? I think I've read this as a tactic as far back as the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960, especially in states where Kennedy was weak. Joe Kennedy's money and mob connections got big crowds for JFK in places like West Virginia.
I know the conspiracy folks have been onto this for a while and regularly claim that many protests or big media events have been stage managed with hired crowds/extras, and that's above and beyond the "false flag" claims where they deny there was anything real about a specific event.
Anyone have humongous ads on the top of the /. page that are fixed and block half the page's content?
I adblocked the frame and get an empty frame up there now. Still there when reloading the page.
This sucks. Will try again later.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
is called FUCK KEVIN BACON
This would be a great idea for you. I would call the App "Rent A Mob".
"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older." I'm over 40 so where can I sign up to sue this company right now. Silicon Valley proves once again it has no intention of fighting discrimination.
and criminalized accordingly.
Awesome Chips in Wood Green Shopping City, London, UK is using this service (or one very like it).
I got fooled by it and tried the chips, they were nothing special. On a later date I asked some people in the queue and they told me they were being paid to buy the chips and either eat them or take them far enough away to dump them without being seen.
I don't know what the business model is because the margin on chips is terrible.
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"