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Google To Add Restaurant Wait Times To Google Search, Maps (techcrunch.com)
Google Search and Maps already show you the peak traffic times for your favorite restaurants, but it will soon show you the wait times as well. Google says the feature begins rolling out today, and will eventually expand to include grocery stores. TechCrunch reports: Google's new restaurant wait times also comes from the aggregated and anonymized data from users who opted in to Google Location History -- the same data that powers popular times, wait times and visit duration. In the case of restaurants, Google will now include a pop-up box that appears when you click on a time frame in the popular times' chart. The box shows the live or historical data labeled as "busy," "usually busy," "usually not busy," etc., along with the wait time. Below the popular times chart, there's also a section that helps users plan their visit by offering info on the peak wait times and duration. (e.g. "People typically spend 45 mins to 2 hr here.") The new wait time feature will be supported on nearly a million sit-down restaurant listings worldwide, initially in Google Search.
"Restaurant-queuing seems to be a cultural phenomenon associated mostly with America. It's not unusual to see a mile-long queue for a restaurant in America but in other parts of the world if there's a few waiting by the door people deem it to be busy and quickly move on to the next place."
Densely populated areas of people with disposable income create a queuing demand. The concept is not unique to America. See well-known noodle shops in Japan where people wait hours for their favorite bowl.
...Either there are not enough restaurants in the US or the management is incompetent or they are just greedy and they accept way too many reservations, just like the US airlines.
There are a metric fuckton of restaurants in the US. The REAL problem is many of them do not accept reservations. They see queues as a way to drive popularity based on hype. Long queues somehow mean it must be the place to eat, and the wait is somehow worth it. This tactic is also a way to drive more revenue by enticing customers to purchase overpriced drinks at the bar while they wait for a table.
The pathetic part is realizing that this bullshit no-reservation policy works. If we want to change this, then we have to get rid of the fucking stupid mentality that queues are somehow hip and cool.