It’s getting to where you can’t do shit in life without bending over and taking it up the pooper by someone trying to rape you for your money. Energy, milk, eggs, clothes, everything.
The latest thing to kill me is tickets. I went to buy a couple tickets to see Lewis Black when he comes to town next month and there is nearly $20 in fees tacked on PER TICKET. That’s almost half the cost for a seat. What the everloving fuck. I love Lewis, but he’s going to get fucked out of my ticket dollars because Ticketmaster is over-fucking me for the strip of paper to get into the building. Then again, Lewis charges quite a bit to see him, so fuck him too.
Another thing that’s pissing me off about tickets is baseball. The Orioles are averaging maybe 20,000 fans per game when the Yankees or Red Sox aren’t in town. Oriole Park holds 48,000. That means there are plenty of seats to go around.
So what does the team do? On its TV broadcasts, the announcers pimp tickets. But not through it’s own website (which is linked to Ticketmaster), which is ass-raping enough. They encourage the purchase of tickets through StubHub, which is a web site that is used to basically scalp tickets and is the “Official Fan to Fan Ticket Marketplace” of the Baltimore Orioles.
I did a little comparison. Through Ticketmaster, a field box ticket in section 44 to see the Orioles play the Detroit Tigers on July 18 is $64.25 ($55.00 + $5.75 “convenience” fee + $3.50 “processing” charge), with free shipping if you choose regular mail. In the same section — the same row, even — through StubHub, a ticket will run you $95.55 ($76.00 + $7.60 “commission” + $11.95 shipping).
$64 is ridiculous enough, especially if you want to take a family and sit in nice seats. But $95 is insane and completely unneccesary since tickets are readily available without dipping into the secondary market, and it’s even worse because this ass raping is heartily sanctioned by the team itself.
Even if you strip out the fees, how can the team justify someone spending $20 more per ticket for no good reason?
Luckily, with the Orioles at least, you can walk up to the stadium an hour before game time and get great seats at face value. But god help you if you try to plan ahead.
Only in America can preparing beforehand cost you far more than acting on impulse.
I, like you, am continually annoyed at the TicketBastard fees. I know the convenience fee is effectively a fee we pay for the monopoly that they have, but from a transaction cost perspective, I just don’t understand it. To me, it is like the fees we pay for “out of network” ATMs. Again, we are dealing with effectively a low-cost transaction, yet here we are paying an exorbitant cost per transaction.
My favorite fee, though, from TicketBastard has to be the fee we pay to, say, print out a ticket. Explain to me how the transmission of a PDF version of a ticket using my own bandwidth, to be printed out on my own printer, using my own ink, and eliminating the need for a paper ticket to be issued. If the airlines have gone the e-ticket route, I don’t understand why TicketBastard charges that fee. Must be the profit-maximizing concern of a monopoly.
As for StubHub and the like, I have yet to see their advantage. I love how there is an official “secondary market” for the major sports leagues. Nothing like legitimizing the ticket scalping process while still allowing them to further gouge us.
But, as you said, trying to be good and get tickets in advance merely makes us pay a veritable boatload of more money.
There is no advantage for a consumer to use StubHub, and that’s what’s so infuriating about the Orioles advocating use of the secondary market: there is no advantage for the consumer to use it, especially in a building with 20,000-30,000 unused seats most nights. And the team knows it.
And you’re right about the printing thing. For some events you’re charged up to $5 for the “privilege” to print from home. Amazing.
The airlines are doing the same funky kinds of things with plane tickets. It just makes me say, raise the damn prices and be done with it. Either people will buy or they won’t. But don’t give some teaser rate and then jack it up. Reminds me of eBay and all the little BS add-ons for “handling”.
Oh thank you for this post. For ever loving fuck’s sake! Ticketmaster and Stub Schlub are raping us. I too am looking for 5 tix for the O’s Tigers on 7/20 for my dad’s birthday. He and my mom are true blue Tiger fans and I’m taking the family out for dad’s birthday. He’s never had the whole fam at once to a game. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna dish out an extra $30 in imaginary fees for nothing. And thanks for reminding me about walk-up tix…Duh! When tix are necessary I often have a need to make sure I have tix so I buy early. But hey, it’s the O’s and they’d be lucky to fill have the yard. I can walk up and save that $$ for a round of beers. And beers! $6.50 for a Miller Lite? But that’s the next blog…Cheers!
This is one of the many faces of what I like to call irresponsible capitalism. I am all for people setting up a company to be their own boss as long as they are providing an actual service or product worth my buck, or bucks. I’ve never used Stubhub, but it sounds like the most recent in a exponentially growing list of “companies” that have no real purpose but to squeeze more money out of our increasingly tighter budgets (thank you Exxon Mobile, BP, Shell, Constellation Energy!).
Are you really surprised though that the O’s have sanctioned this praticular company and their “service”? I mean, this is the team primarily owned by Peter D’Angelo.
You know what is really sick is that we should have seen this coming like 15 years ago when Ticketmaster started their “conveniece fee” shit. They even charge them now for using a credit card when you buy tickets at the window. Like it is somehow inconvient, in this age of credit-mania, to swipe the damn card.
Actually, some of us did see this coming, but at the time, the fees were still so low, no one gave a shit. Bastards - each and everyone of them!
Agrrl: What you call irresponsible capitalism others call synergy. Did you know that eBay owns StubHub, as well as PayPal, so eBay gets a ridiculous 10% “commission” from the buyer of an overpriced ticket on StubHub (based on the premium price, of course), then charges a 15% selling fee and another ridiculous percentage fee to the seller to get his money right away through PayPal rather than wait for a check, which could take up to almost two months? Corporations get you coming and going. (a $100 ticket sold through StubHub will cost the buyer $110 and the seller would get $85, so eBay gets $25 even before the PayPal fee, all on a ticket that probably has a 50% price premium on it to begin with.) But people are willing to purchase their tickets that way, so who’s the fool?
I don’t want to stick up for Peter Angelos, and I have no doubt he could have opted out or at least chosen not to publicize it, but I believe that StubHub’s deal is actually with Major League Baseball and the teams are following the league’s lead. But that makes it even worse, if you ask me.
You’re right about the fees creeping up on us. LiveNation is supposedly setting up its own ticketing service after its deal with Ticketmaster expires at the end of this year and there’s hope LN’s competition will force a reduction in fees, but I’m willing to bet LN will move up to TM’s model rather than force TM to move down to its.
Also, hi.
So, please tell me you are aware of the recent mommyblog drama involving everyones favorite blog superstar sweetney? Well, she was just being her regular bitch self and got called out on it. Of course now she’s doing her usually song and dance about how people should just get over it, because she’s just being snarky and don’t you know that she’s too hip/cool/alternative to be a bitch? Read here: http://plainjanemom.com/2008/07/02/why-should-women-always-have-to-be-nice/#comment-16827
God, girls can be dumb. And Sweetney is the leader of the dumb. But she’s right. There are only like 6 bloggers who can come up with ideas (and of course she’s one of them) and everyone else needs to stop trying to copy their awesome originality.
Even worse, there’s some dumb comment above yours written by some dumb whore who takes herself way too seriously and talks about how mommybots are developing brands and need to protect their intellectual property. This is the kind of bullshit nonsense housefraus get stuffed into their fat heads when they attend things like BlogHer.
(P.S. I almost called that commenter above you a cunt, but I decided to be a little classy.)
Funny how those 6 bloggers are all BFF’s too. The Elite 6. Oh yeah, When people heard dooce made 40k a month off advertising anyone with a keyboard signed up to make the same. I cannot believe how many give-aways and promotions there are at blogs nowadays. It’s insane.
Hooray for you for being classy. Although, I would have preferred otherwise.
You know what gets me about Dooce? She made her online bones by being a hateful, unsympathetic, unsmiling bitch and for some reason people think that’s heroic and she should be admired for being fired from her job because she talked shit about and denigrated everyone she worked with. What the fuck.
Thankfully, I don’t read blogs much anymore so I miss out on all the mommybot drama. Lord knows the internet’s not big enough for everyone.
You buy your family field box tickets? Holy Toledo, I wish you were my dad. I sit my cheap ass exactly where my cheap ass father seated my ass, in Tuesday night Upper Reserve $8 seats. I’d be curious to see how much the Stubhub fees increase to costs of those tickets.
I was just using that section as an example. There’s way too much jew in me to shell out $55 (plus fees) for my 8 year old to watch a game he’s not going to think twice about in a week.
Usually I’ll get upper reserve seats when I take my kid, or upper box if he’s been really good.