Sometimes resale can be fun, like the hunt for a great thrift store find. Sometimes though, resale is a pain, like when you’re paying thousands of dollars to see Taylor Swift.

One resale market you may not have encountered (yet) is restaurant table reservations. But that might be changing.

Adam Iscoe wrote about reservation scalpers and brokers for The New Yorker. He joined “Marketplace’s” Kristin Schwab to talk about what it takes to get a seat at the trendiest places in New York City. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kristin Schwab: This is totally anecdotal, but I feel like it’s harder to get a reservation these days, whether it’s a fine dining restaurant or a buzzy burger joint. What’s changed about the way we actually get a table?

Adam Iscoe: Well, I mean, I think reservations have always been sort of tricky in New York and other places. They’ve always sort of held a cultural currency. You know, it was very hard to get a reservation at The Four Seasons in the ’60s, or Le Cirque in the ’80s, or Per Se in the 2000s. But I think today, as you point out, things are pretty crazy. They’re very different. And a big part of that, I think, is that there’s an entire secondary market to buy and sell reservations online.

Schwab: Yeah, so say I want to make a reservation at a buzzy place that’s been booked for weeks. What are those new ways? What are my options?

Iscoe: So what we see when we log in to OpenTable or to Resy when we’re trying to get that hard-to-grab reservation is not really a reflection of reality. These sort of buzzy, trendy restaurants in New York or LA or wherever we are, are only listing a fraction of their tables online. And this is not entirely new, right? Restaurants have held back tables for celebrities, and for VIPs, and for big wine spenders, and for friends with the manager, you know, you name it — forever. But the tables that we do see, we’re likely to only see them for a few minutes. And after a few minutes, a bot or a table scalper, they grab the reservation and then they sell it back to the highest bidder online.

Schwab: Who are these scalpers? Are they refreshing the reservation page like the rest of us?

Iscoe: Yeah, I mean, they call themselves mercenaries, they call themselves hustlers on a website called AppointmentTrader.com. So you have, you know, an Ivy League college sophomore using a bot to make a reservation. And you also have industry insiders, you know, hotel concierges, bartenders, maitre d’s, line cooks, in some cases risking their jobs to sell reservations. One of the more interesting stories that I heard was about these college kids from affluent families who are borrowing their parents’ Amex Black cards, telephoning the Amex Centurion concierge, having them book a hard-to-get table, and then reselling that reservation online. So people are going to really extreme lengths to make reservations but then to sell them online.

Schwab: I guess that means things are pretty profitable. How profitable is this market?

Iscoe: You know, last year AppointmentTrader sold almost $6 million in restaurant reservations. But the sort of the hustlers, the mercenaries, the table scalpers, they’re making a lot of money too. You know, I talked to one student at Brown University who said he’s making between $70,000 and $80,000 a year selling reservations. Right now, if you were to log on to get a 5 o’clock two-top at 4 Charles Prime Rib in the West Village in New York, the going price is $410. And that’s before you even sit down for that $130 dry-aged, bone-in ribeye steak.

Schwab: Yeah, well, a lot of the restaurants you talk about are sort of elite, trendy, higher-priced restaurants. But are restauranteurs worried that this reservation resale business might trickle down into more average or casual dining?

Iscoe: I think one really important caveat to all of this is that it all really depends on where you want to eat. There are perfectly good tables at perfectly good restaurants all over town where it’s not all that hard to get a reservation. I mean, I think there’s an astounding amount of eateries in New York — something like 25,000 restaurants. What we’re talking about here are the really hard-to-get-into buzzy spots that are coveted by a certain group of folks that really want to go out to eat for a special occasion or, you know, a date night or whatever it is. I think it just sort of remains to be seen whether or not this will sort of trickle down into those other, you know, 10,000 restaurants. We’ll just have to see.

Schwab: So there’s an element of data sharing here between these apps, and some reservations can actually track, say, how much you spend on wine. How are restaurants and these companies collecting data thinking about that?

Iscoe: High-end restaurants have always taken notes on their guests, whether they’re writing in your profile that you’re an HSM, a heavyset man, or WW, a wine whale, if you spend big on wine. But now, as you mentioned, these digital reservation platforms are helping restauranteurs keep track of much more about us as diners: how often we visit, how big our tabs are, do we just sort of sit there at a nice table with a single cup of soup between the two of us. So I do think that we have a sort of new model emerging, just like other aspects of our economy with restaurant reservations.