Question for Ticketmaster
Kindly give me one good reason why I should pay you more money for the “service” of transmitting enough ones and zeroes over the Internet to enable me to print something on my own computer than I pay Amazon to actually, you know, send me stuff through companies that actually charge you money to send me stuff.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Because you have no other options. Aren’t monopolies fun?
tgirsch´s last blog post..Did the World Really Need This?
January 9th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Actually, I did have another option, and I took it: pay the inconvenience charge of driving across town to stand in line and purchase the tickets at face value from a real live human who has to be paid to hand tickets out to people. Which makes a lot more sense than spending $16.00 for the privilege of using a computer that hires no one.
January 11th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Good for you x, I’m glad you passed up Ticketmaster.
But the last time I tried to get tickets elsewhere, I couldn’t find cheaper tickets – anywhere – not even at the venue where they were playing. So I ended up buying from Ticketmaster in the end anyway.
That’s some virtual monopoly they’ve cornered.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:17 am
I’m not sure monopoly is the issue, so much as legalized fraud. I remember the days when they had a competitor, Ticketron, and both companies did exactly the same thing. In the age of Al Gore’s Internet(s), surely venue owners today could easily bypass Ticketmaster if they were so inclined. They already have web sites of their own, so how hard would it be to beef up those sites and sell their own tickets there, as countless other businesses already do? My guess is that Ticketmaster makes it worth their while not to, by charging exorbitant “convenient charges” the venue itself could never have gotten away with, and then kicking back a significant portion of their ill-gotten gains to the venue owner behind the scenes. That way, the venue owner gets the best of both worlds: higher ticket prices, plus the right to falsely advertise them at a lower price.
Xrlq´s last blog post..Avian Paradox
January 12th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
If they hired a web-application programmer to manage the automated ticket system from their own website, I guarantee they’d still have to charge a convenience fee to pay him or her. Perhaps not as exhorbitant as Ticketmaster, but …
January 12th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Nah, that should come out of the price of the ticket, as does the salary of the extra ticket window salesperson they’d have to hire if you didn’t purchase online.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
In which case the ticket price would go up, eh. Would that satisfy your notion of doing away what you currently describe as fraud?
January 12th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Yes. It’s a free country, they can charge what they want. They just shouldn’t be allowed to lie about the price, which is all these junk fees are good for. Well, that plus lamely refusing to refund this part of the price if the event is cancelled.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I’m good with that.
January 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Aw fer cryin’ out loud. Just what kind of member of the new economy, free-market and service-oriented, are you? Just exactly what do you have against giving a large part of your spending money to people who produce nothing, and do nothing that you want them to do for you? Do you want all these poor employees of Ticketmaster to be waiting to clean your widshield with spit and their sleeves, for a quarter, at the end of the off-ramp of I-94?
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January 13th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Xrlq:
That’s true: Before there was the monopoly, there was collusion. :) But I’m surprised driving to the venue box office saved you anything. Most of the time, you still get hit with a bunch of service charges. You know me, I’m a Democrat, and I like regulation: I’d put in a regulation that says that your advertised price for any tickets must include any and all service charges. I bought some tickets for an event here where the advertised price was something like $35, but the lowest actual price you could get them for was almost $60.
tgirsch´s last blog post..Do That To Me One More Time
January 13th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Aww, hell, I forgot to update my CommentLuv.
tgirsch´s last blog post..Up is Down, Black is White
January 13th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
I must be a Democrat, too, then. I’m all for charging what you want, but not for disguising prices by loading crap up with junk fees. If you want to sell a ticket for $13, great. If you’d rather sell it for $20, that’s your prerogative, as well, but then advertise it at that price and let the public decide, without trickery, if that is the price they are willing to pay. My only difference from your position is that I wouldn’t necessarily ban all separate service charges, if they involve actual services above and beyond the basic transaction of purchasing a ticket. If you purchase the ticket the day before the event and they have to overnight the tix instead of sending them regular mail, it’s fair to charge for that. If you want the tickets held at will call, which requires them to hire more people for your convenience, then I have no problem with charging for that, either. But the junk fees we’re talking about here don’t come close. They give the game away by calling them “convenience charges” rather than service charges. They’re not even pretending to offer you a service; they’re admitting up front that the only reason they’re charging you the fee is because purchasing online is convenient for you, not because it costs them anything! A better test is to ask what insurance companies do, as we’re regulated to the hilt and have to justify every surcharge or discount we apply to just about anything. I’ve never heard of any insurance company tacking on a “convenience fee” for those who save them money by quoting or purchasing online. I have heard of carriers offering discounts for that, and expect more to follow suit in the future, as it really is a win-win.
As for buying tickets at face value at the venue box office, I wonder if this is a state by state thing. It seems to be pretty standard here in NC that the venue box office is the one place that actually honored the official price, and I remember California that way, too. I’ve always assumed there was some law allowing you to lie and pretend that the price of the ticket is actually lower than it is, as long as there is one place in the world where people can actually obtain it at that price. But I don’t know.
Xrlq´s last blog post..Avian Paradox
January 15th, 2009 at 11:06 am
My only difference from your position is that I wouldn’t necessarily ban all separate service charges, if they involve actual services above and beyond the basic transaction of purchasing a ticket. If you purchase the ticket the day before the event and they have to overnight the tix instead of sending them regular mail, it’s fair to charge for that.
That’s actually not a difference in position. I agree. If I can drive over to the venue box office at buy a ticket for the advertised price, then that’s legit, as far as I’m concerned, even if they charge extra for stuff like printing your own tickets (stupid but not illegal — and actually not even stupid as long as there are people stupid enough to pay those charges), or charge-by-phone “convenience” fees, or whatever. If you’re advertising the ticket price as $20, as long as there’s some reasonable way people can actually get a ticket for $20, I don’t have a problem with that.
And this is the way it usually is with things like sporting events. But when it comes to concerts, theater tickets, touring shows, etc., you often get hit with service charges no matter how you obtain the tickets. (You’re right that this might be a state-by-state thing.)
The most egregious example I remember is a yearly music festival that happens here in Memphis in a downtown park. Since there is no actual “venue,” there’s no venue box office, and so the only way to buy tickets is through ticketing outlets, which of course charge the “convenience” fees — generally a per-ticket fee plus a per-order fee. They do open ticket booths at the park during the event, if it’s not sold out beforehand, but they also raise the ticket prices once the event starts. So as far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no way of paying the advertised price for tickets.
tgirsch’s last blog post..The Perfect Summation
January 17th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
If there’s no way to purchase the tickets at the advertised price, I’m curious why the plaintiff bar hasn’t had a field day. As far as I’m concerned, that goes beyond what I called “legalized fraud” and into the non-legalized variety. And I don’t think it’s fair to characterize as “stupid” all individuals who pay these ridiculous fees. Going to the venue to buy the ticket is not always a realistic option. It’s bad enough if you work in Winston-Salem and have to waste an extra trip to Greensboro, but what if someone were planning a trip from across the country?
As a formerly true blue libertarian, and still one of the light blue variety, I’m loath to say “there oughta be a law” to almost anything, but this particular business seems so rife with fraud that I could support a law prohibiting “convenience fees” altogether, and requiring venue owners to either not engage Ticketmaster, or to give them a cut of the ticket price instead in lieu of the fees. Another option would be to require any venue owner who engages a ticket agency like TM to advertise the total price as the face value, but remain free to offer a discount to those who purchase directly from the venue owner, if they want to (and of course they won’t want to, since encouraging more people to come there will cost them rather than saving them money). Oddly enough, I’m not even sure Ticketmaster would oppose that. It’s not as though they’re the ultimate beneficiaries of the scam. The venue owners are, being allowed to advertise their tickets as though they were cheaper than they really are.