Ticket ripoff!

So how many Confederate Flags and lawn jockeys do you own? And did you stomp on anybody to get your pc?

Originally posted by [username edited by p.c. moderator]:

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
No. $7.50 is a ripoff no matter what it's called.

I'm slow, so you'll have to bear with me, as I ask for one last clarification. I live in Richmond. Richmond is two hours away from the 9:30 Club. It takes me ~4 hours of my life, plus a tank of gas to get to the 9:30 club. Are you saying that somehow it's a ripoff for me to pay $7 to avoid driving for 4 hours and spending $30 on gas? How in doing so, am I "willingly arguing against my own interests"?

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
If that's OK with you, OK by me. But it's not OK with me.

Great, we understand each other, thread over.

Unless theres something new from USPS stamps do not affix themselves.

Originally posted by Xavier Bush, Power Forward:
So how many Confederate Flags and lawn jockeys do you own? And did you stomp on anybody to get your pc?

Tickets.com mailing fee- $3.25
Rhett Miller's attempts at changing the fight- Priceless.

What's also naive is to make conclusions about the way a business is run when obviously you have no idea.

I have offered constructive criticism: competition. Why does 9:30 have exclusive agreements with Tickets.com and IMP with TicketMaster? No one has answered that question. Why shouldn't they compete with each other so consumers get the benefit of lower fees? These guys are making out like bandits, that's why.

And to reply to the "stamps don't affix themselves" argument, do you really think somebody at Tickets.com is sitting in a room putting stamps on these things? They order prepaid mailers in bulk, and get a bulk postage discount. So even if they charged 37 cents to mail out a ticket, they'd probably still be making money.

and SFA's giving tickets away for people you signup on thier mailing list.

is there a DCist expose on this yet?

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
And to reply to the "stamps don't affix themselves" argument, do you really think somebody at Tickets.com is sitting in a room putting stamps on these things? They order prepaid mailers in bulk, and get a bulk postage discount. So even if they charged 37 cents to mail out a ticket, they'd probably still be making money.

My main point is that in the wicked world we live in there is a cost for everything, everything is not as simple as "a stamp is 37 cents and thats all i should pay." Someone or some machine somewhere is doing some work. Sure, it's a rip-off but its not as transparent as you're making it out to be.

Originally posted by eros:
What's also naive is to make conclusions about the way a business is run when obviously you have no idea.

Exactly. Both Ticketing companies are not small operations and they have mouths to feed too. I can't imagine people who work the phone banks live in the lap of luxury.

Having worked with Ticketmaster on sports events, the service fees don't make them an extraordinary amount of money. Their costs are very high… Also remember that Ticketmasters are franchised by indivdual owners (In DC's case, Abe Pollin and Wash Sport & Ent. own the franchise)

My solution was to move near the 930 club. Like Metrorail, ticket fees higher than a dollar there is a thing of the past for me :cool:

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
Besides tickets.com now has a shopping cart feature for 9:30 shows. I've got tickets for Thrice and SFA in my cart with a single handling fee of $3.25 for the entire order, plus individual shows fee of course. In the past you had to pay the handling fee for each show.

nice. i'll have to take advantage of that next time a band is playing back-to-back nights or something. i havent bought any 930 tickets in a while so i hadn't noticed.

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
I have offered constructive criticism: competition. Why does 9:30 have exclusive agreements with Tickets.com and IMP with TicketMaster?

I don't know exactly, since I'm not in the business. I'd presume (and this is pure specualtion) that tickets.com and ticketmaster make venues sign exclusive contracts for this sort of thing, kinda like Pepsi and CocaCola did with restaurants for the longest time. Also, I'd think with ticketing, you need some sort of central database or something to know how many tickets are sold and if there's any left. For sit down venues, you have to know which particular seats are sold. So, if two ticketing agents sold together, where would this central database be? Would each company get a block of tickets? There's alot of issues that would make this difficult.

Also, there is competition in that every few years, ticketmaster and tickets.com negotiate rates with the venues, I'd imagine.

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
I have offered constructive criticism: competition. Why does 9:30 have exclusive agreements with Tickets.com and IMP with TicketMaster? No one has answered that question. Why shouldn't they compete with each other so consumers get the benefit of lower fees? These guys are making out like bandits, that's why.

Because it's no different than going into a restaurant that only serves Coke or Pepsi.

Your "logic" makes no sense.

Precisely: It's NOT transparent. That's part of the problem. On their Web site, it suggests the $3.25 if for mailing. But when you call them up and ask them about it, they give you another story completely. And if you go back through this thread, you will see that I have never said that they shouldn't be making money or marking up. What I've said is that their fees are way unreasonable and people are getting ripped off because these are monopoly setups.

because tickets.com and ticketmaster sign exclusive agreements with venues to be the seller… I.M.P. shows are done at venues other than the 9:30 club which fallen under ticketmaster. The 9:30 club can choose who to deal with. Once upon a time it was Protix (which became tickets.com),then Ticketmaster, then back to tickets.com.

Can you imagine the mass confusion there would be if two companies were selling tickets to events at the same time? Besides what interest would those companies have in competing over price…

Originally posted by BoomBoom:

And to reply to the "stamps don't affix themselves" argument, do you really think somebody at Tickets.com is sitting in a room putting stamps on these things?

In college i spent my summers doing that…yeah, it didn't give me any real world experience, but i got first dibs on tickets.

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
and SFA's giving tickets away for people you signup on thier mailing list.

Woah, what is this?

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
Precisely: It's NOT transparent. That's part of the problem. On their Web site, it suggests the $3.25 if for mailing. But when you call them up and ask them about it, they give you another story completely. And if you go back through this thread, you will see that I have never said that they shouldn't be making money or marking up. What I've said is that their fees are way unreasonable and people are getting ripped off because these are monopoly setups.

As I've said about 10 times, you need to consider the cost you're charged not versus the cost to tickets.com, but versus the cost it would cost you otherwise.

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
On their Web site, it suggests the $3.25 if for mailing. But when you call them up and ask them about it, they give you another story completely.

When you call them, what do they claim the Delivery Fee is for, other than the cost of mailing tickets?

<img src="http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/onion_news922.article.jpg" alt=" - " />

Take it up with this guy

Originally posted by BoomBoom:
No, Richmond. What I'm saying is that the fee is way too high, no matter how far you're coming. It costs them the same to mail a ticket to Richmond as it does to the apartment across the street from the 9:30 Club. But you're paying $3.25 for it. If that's OK with you, OK by me. But it's not OK with me.

Again, I'm not arguing that they have to mail at cost. But $3.25 is outrageous.

What I'm hearing you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is as follows. If a show is base price $15, then $7.50 in charges is out of line because it's half the ticket price. However, you would be okay with paying $7.50 if the ticket was $30 or $50 or higher since the fee is less than %50 of the base ticket price?

I can see your point when the base price of a show is low and the fees are half of this low baseline. It doesn't make a show very cheap when the 'total' dollars are charged.

One resolution would be to lobby the organization that you feel is in the wrong for a system that charges a progressive service charge. That way, when you see a show that's 15 bucks, the service charge is low, say 2 bucks. Then when Good Charlotte rolls through or you want to attend or Gwen Stefani/Black Eyed Peas and ticket prices are $55 the service fee increases at a corresponding rate.

The underlying idea here is that we would of course avoid this trap because all the bands we like are too indie to charge a high baseline ticket price.