During the week of Jan. 5, the restaurant’s owners, Phila and Rachel Lorn, used Mawn’s Instagram to scorn a woman attempting to sell dinner reservations for the restaurant on the “Buy, Sell, Trade” section of Philaqueens. This private Facebook group has approximately 75,000 members.
“It’s disrespectful. Nobody should be making money off a free reservation … We felt like we had a responsibility to [say to] all the people who can’t get a reservation, ‘This is not OK,’” said Rachel Lornto The Philadelphia Inquirer. Lorn manages the front-of-house operations for Mawn, including the restaurant’s guest book.
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Virtually every major city has been experiencing problems with restaurant reservation scalping, including Philadelphia. As the practice of reservation scalping becomes more prevalent, so has legislation aimed at prohibiting it.
At Mawn, Lorn said she feels “powerless” against platforms like Appointment Trader. She often discovers after the fact when a reservation has been resold. She also tries to disguise her suspicion when a guest shows up and can’t recall the name for the reservation.