# Restaurant prices should vary by time and location

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/restaurant-prices-should-vary-by-time-and-location/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Nick Kokonas](https://realalpha.app/people/nick-kokonas/) · Nick Kokonas is an entrepreneur, options trader, restaurateur and software founder. · Built Chicago's Alinea Group and co-founded Tock, the restaurant reservations platform later acquired by American Express.
- Host: [Shaan Puri](https://realalpha.app/people/shaan-puri/) · Co-host, My First Million · Sold Bebo to Twitch in 2019; co-founded the crypto newsletter Milk Road.
- Show: My First Million
- Episode: [How to find your arbitrage (from the guy who’s done it 3x)](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/), Oct 26, 2026
- Moment: 43:13 to 48:03 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/restaurant-prices-should-vary-by-time-and-location/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2593

## Quote

> “I genuinely believe that geofence, meaning localized dynamic and variable pricing for time-slotted businesses is something that someone's going to make **hundreds of billions of dollars** with.”
> — [Nick Kokonas](https://realalpha.app/people/nick-kokonas/) at [46:58](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2818) · My First Million

## Takeaways

1. A Tuesday night and Saturday night table have different value.
2. Dynamic pricing can match supply with demand.
3. Nick sees geofenced pricing as a huge opportunity.

## About this segment

Nick Kokonas saw reservations and fixed menus as slow versions of trading-floor inefficiencies. He predicts localized, time-slot pricing could become a major business.

From “How to find your arbitrage (from the guy who’s done it 3x)”, Oct 26, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[43:25](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2605) Time scale, is that what you said? Yeah, roughly. What do you mean by that? Once I was in the restaurant business, the slow thing became, how do people make reservations? That was the equivalent of the 32nd piece of paper, right? And people still call restaurants. It's so weird. There's nothing worse experience at a restaurant than going up to host stand, hearing a phone ring and getting this. I'll be right with you.

[43:52](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2632) And you're the customer. And the first thing you see is, might as well be the middle finger. I'm on the phone, right? And then they hang up and they go, essentially, who are you? And do you belong here? That's terrible hospitality, but that's every restaurant. So we got into starting to build Alinea, and I was like, we got to get rid of that. And then, okay, well, how do you get rid of that? How do you know who's walking in the front door without them telling you who they are?

[44:17](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2657) It's not that hard, you know? How do you get rid of the host stand so it doesn't feel off-putting? How do you then get, like, the analogy I used at the time was like, it's like going to a sweater store and you see all these different color sweaters and styles of sweaters and you're like, hey, I want that blue cardigan cashmere sweater. Can't have it. What can I have? I don't know. Guess it, one of the other 300 sweaters.

[44:39](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2679) And that's what OpenTable was like in 2005. That's what, the software was dismal. They wanted to intermediate the relationship between the customer and the restaurant. That's how they, that was their arbitrage. and so you know talk was born out of my frustration with not knowing the customer it was a it was a KYC thing you know know your customer then it was overlaying the value of that customer which is different on a Tuesday night at 9 p.m. in Chicago when no one goes out to dinner than it is on a Saturday night 7 p.m. when everyone goes out to dinner right those two things should be priced differently and they're not that was obvious to you but was not obvious to the world it's still not obvious to the world right you know i don't want to get political here but elizabeth warren a couple months ago tweeted we need to make a law against dynamic pricing

[45:29](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2729) everything's dynamically priced this table is dynamically priced it's just really slow this is dynamically priced this water everything is dynamically priced like it's not nothing nothing's price forever yeah and what she's really saying is is that we don't want to squeeze people when bad things happen. Agreed. But the best way to do that is to dynamically price things as fast as you possibly can.

[45:53](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2753) Right. And so like Uber, when Uber did surge pricing, that is the dumbest way you could possibly name something. Right. And they got in a lot of trouble for it. Chose the wrong word for the right idea. Correct. And Travis tried to explain it. He was, they were like, how, you know, on New Year's Eve, you guys are going to be gouging people with this surge pricing. And he's like, we need to get more drivers onto the road to meet the demand.

[46:18](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2778) We need the supply to rise to meet the demand. How do you get the supply to rise? You give it an incentive that you're going to make more money. I will say that I was a little too autist like Travis was on that. Like, I remember that. And I was like, dude, just call it dynamic. Like, get rid of the surge word. And, you know, my original pitches to restaurant was like, look, you're paying people to sell to your rivals like if you're full and you're really busy on a Wednesday all they're gonna do is say well you should go to this restaurant down the street you know which is terrible like you should just change your pricing right but people are like well we print our menus once every quarter so that time scales off you should print your menu in some respect every day or every hour or every minute so you still even after talk and selling talk for hundreds of millions you still

[47:06](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2826) see that this problem is like you know just fundamentally not solved across the economy I genuinely believe that geofence, meaning localized dynamic and variable pricing for time-slotted businesses is something that someone's going to make hundreds of billions of dollars with. And I simply got tired of... Convincing people of it. The time it says, you know, it's like trying to convince a restaurant owner who every day is game, and I understand why.

[47:33](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2853) Every day is game day. That is not their core business. That is what they self-selected out of when they got into the restaurant business. They don't want to do accounting. You need a big dumb button that you hit once that says, make more money. Right. And then the whole backend needs to do that. And now with AI, maybe we have that big dumb button. We do have that big dumb button. So let me ask you a question.

[47:51](https://realalpha.app/v/YdRLpWQARtA/?t=2871) How does a guy who goes from trading and no restaurant experience