> A couple of my friends are scalpers.
You have bad friends.
Edit: Aren't scalpers viewed as the scum? Why the downvotes?
Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Selling some at a lottery provides a market for people who would be priced out very early along the curve. If you want to avoid a Hunger Games situation where only the rich and famous enjoy your product (the NBA and many musicians care about this) that sort of person needs to be provided for
Here is the deal, they already give fans an in road on buying play off tickets. Be a season ticket holder. Now some will argue this is not sufficient but the rub is, if your not going to support the team the full season then why should you have preference over someone who does? So all teams provide for regular fans. However many people who do complain about the 'system' are fans of fancy, as in fans when the team win…
Season tickets cost thousands of dollars and in many cases have extremely long waiting lists. When I still lived in the DC area, the waiting list for Redskins season tickets was decades long.
It's important to keep the sport seemingly accessible for the long term prospects of the sport.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#23It feels like the ticketing process in general is broken. There's too much demand for events, making the entire market dysfunctional. Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.
I can't relate to any of the arguments in this thread! Why does it need to be fair? It's a private business putting on an event that nobody needs to go to except as a luxury entertainment. It's not access to food and water. We don't expect that other limited luxuries should be available to everyone, so why concerts and sport events? Surely tickets going to the people who'll pay the most is fair?
Wouldn't this be case-by-case? That argument makes perfect sense if we're talking about a bar hosting a band, but I can't apply that same logic to a stadium whose cost was largely borne by taxpayers with the promise it would enrich public life.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#24It feels like the ticketing process in general is broken. There's too much demand for events, making the entire market dysfunctional. Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.
I can't relate to any of the arguments in this thread! Why does it need to be fair? It's a private business putting on an event that nobody needs to go to except as a luxury entertainment. It's not access to food and water. We don't expect that other limited luxuries should be available to everyone, so why concerts and sport events? Surely tickets going to the people who'll pay the most is fair?
At the very least the actual artist and venue are not seeing the profits during most of this price gouging. But the resellers are.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#25A few years ago Louis CK started selling tickets for his shows exclusively from his website. His post announcing the process is worth a read. I bought tickets for that show from him and the process was as simple as he describes it.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if the supply of tickets is lower than the demand, which it obviously is, tickets will essentially only go to the people able to spend the most money on them.
That's how almost all goods in the world are allocated. Is a lottery more fair?
If the demand for hamburgers exceeds the supply, then the market will hopefully do its thing and supply more hamburgers. On the other hand supplying a few more copies of your favorite band or sports team is not going to happen any time soon.
Whether a lottery would be more fair depends on your point of few. Many would certainly say no because the artist or sports team would make less money than they could and people willing to pay a lot of money to get tickets would lose their ability to do so.
Others like me would consider it more fair, it is a kind of failure of the free market and favors rich people just because they are rich. I would argue that one should actually favor the poorer people because being able to go to a concert or game for a reasonable price may add lot more value in terms of quality of life for them as compared to rich people already having access to all kinds of niceties.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#27Nontransferable tickets seem terrible, mostly because they screw regular people as much as "devious resellers." Would no longer be possible to gift tickets or recover costs in the case of an unexpected cancellation.
I'm more curious why they have to be sold on a FCFS basis rather than an auction or via random selection.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#28A few years ago Louis CK started selling tickets for his shows exclusively from his website. His post announcing the process is worth a read. I bought tickets for that show from him and the process was as simple as he describes it. https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road
He certainly doesn't still exclusively do that. Tickets for his current tour are sold through Ticketmaster.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#29What's wrong with blindly auctioning off all of the tickets? That way more tickets will be sold, the artist can't be accused of being greedy, there won't be much profit in the resale market, and everyone who attends the show will have paid an amount they thought was reasonable during the bidding process.
Because if the supply of tickets is lower than the demand, which it obviously is, tickets will essentially only go to the people able to spend the most money on them.
That's no different than now, except the money will go to the artists and producers and not some useless middleman with a fast web scraper.
Re: Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals
#30I think this is like asking for 'Right to redressal for hurt feelings'. Simple economic logic dictates that those who pay highest for music/sporting events get privilege to watch that live.
These fans seems to be asking for Right to watch live. What if less popular artists/sports teams ask for Right to Audience? I think government should start looking into that also after all there must be lots of mediocre artists/sports persons/chefs etc looking for patrons.