Family Feuds·
DEPOSIT OR GHOST SLOTS
An overburdened family practice confronts a 25% no-show rate as a determined poster tests deposits and automation to prove how lost revenue drains the business.
Who's wrong: deposit demand or the uncle's no-deposit stance?
Be one of the first to vote.
Thirteen appointments vanished in a single month, and the family business still had to pay rent.
For the poster, that was the problem in plain numbers: last month's 13 no-shows made up roughly 25% of the practice's slots. The appointments were gone, but the overhead was not. Rent still had to be paid. Bills still came due. And about one out of every four work hours was being spent essentially for free.
The poster had been helping out at the family's practice, but the bigger issue was the person running it: an uncle who owned the business and refused to budge.
The poster wanted to add a deposit system for bookings, so customers would have "some skin in the game" before reserving a spot. The idea was simple enough: if people put money down, they might be less likely to ghost the appointment.
The uncle hated it.
"How can I say this to my customers? It's too rude. You don't understand business," he told the poster, according to the post. In his view, being "nice" mattered more than being profitable. He rejected the deposit idea outright and pushed back against the whole premise, treating the poster's approach like a mistake from someone who didn't know how a real business worked.
The poster did not leave it there.
To make the case, they built a basic automated booking flow as a CS student. It included reminders, a deposit process, and a tracker designed to show exactly how much revenue was being lost to no-shows. The whole setup was meant to turn the argument from feelings into numbers, a way to show the uncle, in hard data, what a month like that actually cost.
The poster described themselves as trying to play "bad cop" in a business that relied on relationships, especially in a small town. But they still wanted to know whether a deposit model had worked anywhere like this before, and whether it really "scare[s] people away" or simply filters out customers who do not respect the practice's time.
The central question was not whether no-shows were annoying. The question was whether a family-run business could keep absorbing them, or whether asking for a deposit was the only way to stop 13 empty slots from turning into lost money every month.