Ticketmaster Rediculousness.
It started out innocent enough, my kids love Monster Trucks, and an upcoming Monster Truck event has been plastered over the TV and Radio all week. So being a fun parent, I decided it would be pretty cool to take my kids to see it this coming weekend - a good outting for us all! Little did I know that just getting tickets to this event would be an adventure, and i'd be subjected to a bunch of scam artists.
Being that its 2005, and I buy 98% of everything off of the internet, I went to "TicketMaster" to buy the tickets - great! Only $12.00 each. I click on purchase 3, get some fairly poor seats, but I go along with it. Then I get to the pay screen, and see i'm charged $7.10 PER TICKET with something they call a "Convience Charge".. Convience? Wait a minute, its just as easy for them to sell something over the internet, as it is for me to buy it - but I got to pay a ludracrious fee for this? WORSE, they charge a rediculuosly inflated shipping fee to ship the tickets to me! Have these guys ever heard of Buy+Print? You know, the thing Airlines have used for 5 years.. So I called the Stadium directly thinkin' I will bypass this garbage, and was told that the only way to get tickets online or over the phone is through Ticketmaster??? WTF? I'm not giving up so easy, I open up google, and do a search for ticket companies, and its not long when I discover Ticketmaster has a monopoly.. The only other big ticket sellers are scam companies that buy bulk tickets low, and sell them high on their sites... Lovely..
Is it any wonder why attendance at events and stadiums is down, and continues to decline? Is it any wonder why event coordinators have to GIVE AWAY tickets to fill their arenas so they can sell them beer and soda? It doesn't take much for the common guy to realise hes being ripped off - it takes even less time for me to realise it, and I don't like it one bit.
With that being said, I have some personal experiance with how these things operate. Fresh out of highschool I was hired by the Palace of Auburn Hills for event security and bodyguard duty. But my best friend was the marketing coordinator there, and I got some pretty vivid details on how this crap works, and why the average consumer is so screwed.. For one, big companies get comped tickets YEARS in advance to things, and they buy LARGE blocks of them - then they hand them out to their employees and familes/friends (Example would be Pharmacutical companies passing out basketball tickets to doctors to get them to prescribe their drugs more often). You guessed it, often these are the best seats... Second, event coordinators at these stadiums reserve LARGE BLOCKS of their best seats to give to Radio Stations to promote their event - you know those ticket giveaways you hear all day on the radio. Then another block of tickets with great seats is set aside for event participants, their families, and everyone else they know.. So whats left for the consumer, who ironically is the only one paying? The worst seats in the house - upper decks, endcaps, and otherwise poor locations. Don't believe me? Go to Ticketmaster, and pick any event, and then select "Get me the best seats" and see where you are sitting. Point made.
So between the rediculously inflated monopolistic control that Ticketmaster has.. Between the poor seating due to corporate greed, and radiostations, and the hoops I have to go through to get seats... Do you really think I have any desire to actually fork out my money for this punishment? Ironically its not me that suffers, its the children.. All they want to do is go see some super cool trucks, and have a great day out - but in corporate America, the greed comes first and the mighty buck rules all.
