The New England Patriots recently won the right to obtain the names of season ticket holders who sell their tickets on Stubhub (an online ticket reseller), which they may use to revoke those people’s season tickets. (See link: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3069481). As is the age old custom of ticket scalping, ticket holders would sell unwanted tickets for, ideally, greater than face-value. In one example from the article, a pair of $125 tickets to an upcoming game against the New York Jets was being resold for $1300.05.
Privacy issues aside, the greatest threat in this case is the idea that valuable commodities such as these tickets cannot be transferred in exchange for their increase in value. These tickets, in my opinion, became the property of the ticket-holders the minute they made their final payment to the team. At that time the holders should be allowed to do whatever they please with those tickets, including selling them for ridiculous amounts of money to fools who want to see the Jets lose by 65. According to my math, which is highly questionable, the holder of the $125 tickets shelled out about $2000 for the pair of tickets for the entire season. Thus, by selling his seats to a game that will be a blowout and of little interest, he will be recouping 65% of his costs. Now some idiot Jets fan gets to see his team get crushed by one of the greatest teams in recent memory, the season-ticket holder gets almost all of his tickets paid for and he can spend an extra weekend with his spouse pretending that she means more to him than the Pats. As Michael Scott would say, that is a win, win, win scenario.
Owners of teams raise ticket prices all the time, based on the idea that the demand will not evaporate with the increase. So, why shouldn’t ticket holders share that same ability? Rise up and fight for your right to resell your tickets for exorbitant amounts of money, which is the American way.*
* = As with all of my posts, this comes with the caveat that Angel and Laker fans cannot sell their playoff tickets as we should pride ourselves to be true fans above such petty concerns like making a profit.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Fight For Your Market Capitalist Rights
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2 comments:
Nice article Stephen Colbert.
The only question that I have is when a person buys a ticket or a season ticket, does the team include information about reselling the tickets that would make it a contract violation to resell the ticket. There might even be something written right on the ticket. The team seems to think they are in the right on this issue. We shall see.
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