Since my wife and I are elderly and basically have all the material possessions we want, I decided to get her an "experience" for her 70th birthday. We will be in Florida during the month of February; she is an Andrea Bocelli fan; he has a concert scheduled for February; cool, right?
The face price for the tickets in "peanut heaven" is something like $150 per ticket. The "good" tickets are well into four digits, each. This WAAAAAAAY more than I would generally spend on such a thing (that's three rounds of golf, with cart, translating it to real value), but...WTF, right?
So I pop into the website for the venue - Amalie Arena - and hit the link for tickets, and I'm directed to TICKET[fucking]MASTER, where those $150 tickets are...$365 each (approximately). Whoa!
So I go to Bocelli's own website and click to buy tickets from there...same thing. Ticketmaster...$365 per ticket.
So I check out other ticket purveyors and they are all the same thing.
I get in touch with my Cuz, who lives in Tampa (Largo), and ask him if he can go to the arena and buy them in person, to avoid these "excessive" markups. He says it makes no difference; in person, on line, prices are the same. (Not sure if we just trying to blow me off, since he might not want to drive to the venue as a favor to me).
Well, I decided that you only live once, so I hit the button for the $735 tickets. Two minutes later, my wife comes storming into the room, asking, "DID YOU JUST SPEND $735 ON SOMETHING???" There goes the surprise, I guess. So I explained it to her. She had gotten an alert from Capital One, saying that some crazy bastard had just spent $735 in Tampa, Florida, with our credit card. She said, "I'm going to cancel it."
So she goes to cancel it and the credit card robot says, "OK, since that was a fraudulent purchase, we are going to cancel your credit card, alert the FBI, [etc]..." and I say, wait a second. It was not a fraudulent purchase and I don't want to go through that bullshit, so she cancels that response and we are good to go. A little poorer, but good to go.
Then of course, they send me another solicitation, offering to secure me a parking space for $70...I'll take a fucking Uber to the concert before I let those bastards screw me again.
So as I understand it, TICKETMASTER and others buy up these tickets as soon as they are available, then re-sell them to gullible humans (like me) for "market price." Is that the deal? I'm surprised that Bocelli and his posse would go along with this - or are they cashing in as well? Didn't this issue come up a few months ago with a Taylor Swift tour?
The last concert I went to was Peter Paul and Mary in 1968. If this is the deal, I will never go to another one. If my wife doesn't enjoy it I will kill her [figuratively speaking, of course].
The face price for the tickets in "peanut heaven" is something like $150 per ticket. The "good" tickets are well into four digits, each. This WAAAAAAAY more than I would generally spend on such a thing (that's three rounds of golf, with cart, translating it to real value), but...WTF, right?
So I pop into the website for the venue - Amalie Arena - and hit the link for tickets, and I'm directed to TICKET[fucking]MASTER, where those $150 tickets are...$365 each (approximately). Whoa!
So I go to Bocelli's own website and click to buy tickets from there...same thing. Ticketmaster...$365 per ticket.
So I check out other ticket purveyors and they are all the same thing.
I get in touch with my Cuz, who lives in Tampa (Largo), and ask him if he can go to the arena and buy them in person, to avoid these "excessive" markups. He says it makes no difference; in person, on line, prices are the same. (Not sure if we just trying to blow me off, since he might not want to drive to the venue as a favor to me).
Well, I decided that you only live once, so I hit the button for the $735 tickets. Two minutes later, my wife comes storming into the room, asking, "DID YOU JUST SPEND $735 ON SOMETHING???" There goes the surprise, I guess. So I explained it to her. She had gotten an alert from Capital One, saying that some crazy bastard had just spent $735 in Tampa, Florida, with our credit card. She said, "I'm going to cancel it."
So she goes to cancel it and the credit card robot says, "OK, since that was a fraudulent purchase, we are going to cancel your credit card, alert the FBI, [etc]..." and I say, wait a second. It was not a fraudulent purchase and I don't want to go through that bullshit, so she cancels that response and we are good to go. A little poorer, but good to go.
Then of course, they send me another solicitation, offering to secure me a parking space for $70...I'll take a fucking Uber to the concert before I let those bastards screw me again.
So as I understand it, TICKETMASTER and others buy up these tickets as soon as they are available, then re-sell them to gullible humans (like me) for "market price." Is that the deal? I'm surprised that Bocelli and his posse would go along with this - or are they cashing in as well? Didn't this issue come up a few months ago with a Taylor Swift tour?
The last concert I went to was Peter Paul and Mary in 1968. If this is the deal, I will never go to another one. If my wife doesn't enjoy it I will kill her [figuratively speaking, of course].
