Today’s Boston Globe business section contains a piece about legislative efforts to allow ticket resellers to charge what the market will bear for tickets. Is this something that people should care about, or should we just let the market determine how much one pays for a ticket to a premium event?
On the Red Sox Nation message board, the bill is referred to by one frequent poster from Haverhill as “SLAP”, the Scalper Legalization and Protection Act”. Fair on unfair? This comes at a time when Judge Mark Coven recently ruled that one reseller has violated current Mass. law on reselling, which, on the books, is very restrictive. ($2 over face plus “fees”)
What do you think?
Please share widely!
(a) enforce the current law, where “fees” are limited to single digits so that these ticket brokerage houses have to abide by the same laws that Joe Fan on Yawkee Way does, or
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(b) eliminate the law.
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Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. I can’t get away with selling my pair on the street for $40 above face, but ACE Tickets can. That isn’t fair to anyone.
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Of course, if you get rid of the scalp laws, look for season ticket holders to be treated like they own a contract, not a commodity — treated like the airlines treat customers, with limits on resale, etc. Alternatively, they could use a blacklist system: if a person is ejected, they take the ticket, run it through the database, and see who purchased the ticket. That person is barred from purchasing tickets for the next x games/months/seasons. In this way, people would be less likely to sell their tickets on the open market since it might cost them future ticket opportunity. The Masters does this with their lifetime season tickets — if somebody has your pass and they get ejected, you lose your pass for life.
There is still a brisk scalper market. You would have no problem selling your tickets on the street there and practically zero risk of getting caught. So I would not call the current situation the “worst of both worlds”.
If you let someone use your Patriots tickets and they get ejected, you lose your season tickets. And they are quick to eject folks for bad behavior because demand is off the charts.
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Not sure if the Red Sox do the same, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t, demand being what it is over there.
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Bruins would probably round up homeless folks and let you beat them with a hockey stick if you agreed to buy season tickets.
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I’d rather sale and resale of tickest be limited to the venue or team.
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When tickets sell out, they can generate a waiting list. Got tickets but then can’t use them? Notify the Red Sox and they will refund your money if there is a buyer available.
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You don’t even need to send the paper ticket back and they don’t need to send a paper ticket on the resale. They can cancel the code for one ticket and reissue a receipt a different bar code for the resale.
The thing that annoys the hell out of me is that ticket reselling means that it’s very hard for ordinary fans to buy tickets directly from the team at face value. Instead, many tickets are being bought up by people/companies who have no interest in going to the game — they just buy them so they can resell the tickets for a nice profit.
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It wasn’t always this way. I remember buying OK bleacher seats on redsox.com in August 2003 for several late September games. Clearly the World Series win kicked up interest several notches, but the games were already selling out (streak of sellouts started in May 2003). I can’t see how a World Series win drove fan interest to the point that tickets now sell out in hours, instead of my 2003 experience buying tickets. Did the big online outlets go into overdrive in 2004/2005 to set up banks of PCs to overwhelm the “virtual waiting room”?
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I’m in favor of any change that makes it easier for ordinary fans go to games using tickets they bought at face value (or reasonably close to that) and drives the speculators out of the market. Allowing only the team to resell would be a good step in the right direction.
The proposed law benefits no one other than season ticket holders and scalpers. I don’t want attending Red Sox games to become an almost exclusive privilege of the rich.
Scalpers can be good and bad. One way they can be good: there’s a game you want to see, but couldn’t get a ticket before. In today’s world, you can just show up to the big game and know that someone will sell you a ticket, somehow.
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Reason why you can’t just let the market determine the price: lots of people will buy more and more tickets, inflating the already-expensive ticket prices of just about any event in Boston. Furthermore, some things that aren’t even known as scalping events would probably become so, if people were allowed to legally do so (tickets to the Opera House, anyone?).
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I’d favor some sort of compromise. $2 profit on a ticket is way too low – why not turn it into a reasonable percentage? Say, let’s allow a 10-15% legal mark-up on the ticket. That would prevent obscene price gouging and probably keep scalpers away from events that you may not want them at, yet allow there to be some kind of regulation over scalpers so it’s done fairly and honestly, or at least as much as it would be possible for a scalper to sell anything fairly and honestly.
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Furthermore, a 10-15% mark up would probably cover the risk of actually buying the expensive tickets to begin with. Not every scalper can find a buyer: one of my cousin’s favorite ways to go see the Sox is to wait until the 2nd or 3rd inning and find the scalpers who couldn’t sell their tickets. She claims they’ll usually sell it cheaper than the cost of the ticket because they just want to get rid of them at that point.
The current system is nothing more than an incentive to create scarcity and drive up the price.
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Under the current system, if you want to go to 10 games, it encourages you to buy season tickets, go to 10 games, and resell the other 61 at a huge profit (because you can). As a result, more people are encouraged to buy tickets for the purpose of reselling, rather than putting their own buttocks in the bleachers.
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Selling tickets for more than double face value should be a felony with a minimum one-year sentence of hard labor.
What I really haven’t seen addressed anywhere about the current law is this $2 cap over the ticket price, which presumably was never adjusted for inflation. This law was put back in place in the 20s. Sure would like to know what an average ticket price was back at the time of enactment; bet you’d find it was a heckuva lot less than the $2 cap, which implies a then mandated cap of 100% say, rather than 10-15% on the face value being bantered around here in the comments.
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Another example of what happens when you forget to index a legal number for more than 80 years.
to two times face value ….
according to the Globe piece today.
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Does this law exist in the first place, and why don’t the Red Sox, Patriots etc. charge as much for their tickets as the market will bear. Sounds to me like we need to get eBay involved in this process … oh, wait, they already are …
Ohio State, we were required to pay a student activity fee (not very high, something like US$14) for which we got tickets to home football gams. That seemed like an imposition, but we would make a minor fortune reselling our tickets when OSU would play UMich in Columbus.
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Irrespective of that, laws against scalping never made any sense to me. If a team wants to prevent scalping, there’s a simple, but somewhat convoluted, way of going about it: print the purchasors name on the tickets (I’ve never been to Fenway, but I presume that they print the tickets at the point of sale) and require a picture ID, along with the ticket, in order to enter. People entering as a family unit could do with the ID of just one of the family members.
Season ticket holders have their number printed on it.
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There are legitimate reasons why tickets don’t match with names — season tickets may be used by a company to reward employees or clients, I might have to cancel on short notice and give my tickets to a friend, etc. A picture ID is not required except maybe at “Will Call”.
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The Patriots have asserted in a lawsuit that they are selling a license to sit in their seats and that right is non-transferable. So if anyone is going to resell Pats tickets, it should be them, in their opinion.
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In San Diego, the Padres let their season ticket holders sell for over face, but they share in the “profits”.
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In cases where stadiums are governmentally owned or subsidized, do those teams have a public purpose in curbing resellers?
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If resellers are not going to be regulated, should the teams just put prime tickets out to bid and accrue the benefits. I’d rather put more money in the Sox’ hands to pay players than put them in a resellers hands for a nice house in the burbs. After all, A-Rod’s going to cost a lot of money! (just kidding!)