If my memory serves me at all correctly, football became the dominant American favored sport back during the infamous baseball strike. This made football fans feel good, after all, since their sport was now #1.
Well, welcome to today’s world. Go online right now on something like StubHub or Ebay. Look up Super Bowl tickets and check out the prices for the cheapest seats. Yes, that’s your reward, football fans! For those of you who don’t know, tickets are starting at around $3000…a piece! Quite honestly, most tickets are $4000 and up, and that’s still in the nosebleed section. Decent seats right now start at $9000 per ticket. Yes, that’s right, the price of a car!
I’m no stranger to ticket buying. I know full well that ticket prices go up and down as the event nears and if you’re a really smart shopper you can get some sort of a deal. I think in this case, though, “deal” is a relevant term. So, how did we get to this point?
I remember about 10 years ago when I asked a good friend of mine why he was all of a sudden following the WNBA versus the NBA. Now, I meant no disrespect by this, you see. I was just curious why someone who was such a huge basketball fan was completely ignoring the NBA after all this time. I don’t remember his exact words but it was something like this: “…because someone has deemed that watching pro sports is only for the rich…”
I’ll admit that at the time I wasn’t fully following his logic. I’m not a huge sports fan, per se, although I do enjoy baseball, and the world of tickets was just starting to change around this point so I wasn’t really understanding. In reflection, I think that the sports world got hit first so I was a bit slow on the awakening to the new era of tickets. It wasn’t long after, though, that concert tickets went from being the usual $50 per ticket up to $250. The first time I saw that price increase was for the Simon and Garfunkel reunion around 2001. I thought there was certainly no way that this was going to last. I mean, how could it?
I was wrong…and my friend was right. Let’s be frank: tickets were always a bit pricey to begin with, no? To be honest, even at $50 a ticket that’s a bit tricky for some people to pay, especially if they’re taking a family. But $250? I believe the logic that companies like Ticketmaster used in this price hike was that they were losing money in the scalping/aftermarket so they were just going to make better seats have a premium price to begin with. And what has been the result? Yeah, you know the answer. Scalping hasn’t changed, in fact, it’s even more acceptable and more of a business today than it was. Heck, even Ticketmaster themselves have their own scalping website so that they reap the rewards on both ends. All that’s really happened from this enormous price hike is that previously a scalper would charge $200 for a $50 list price ticket, and now today they charge $1000 for a $250 priced ticket.
Brace yourselves. You know I’m going to use the “C” word, don’t you? Yes, that’s right, this is just another example of the 2011 version of American capitalism gone completely out of control and off the designated path. I promise not to go on one of my political rants so let’s just leave that as it is.
No lower income family can possibly pay $3000+ for a Super Bowl ticket. Most middle class families can’t pay that kind of money for one game either. So who gets these tickets? The rich, of course. So, like my friend had stated, someone along the way has in fact deemed that only the rich should enjoy ever seeing these sorts of events.
My real point is what are we, as consumers, going to do about this? When are we going to do it?! And most importantly, why haven’t we already done something about it?!
Here’s what we should do: we should simply stop watching these games, buying any of their sports related merchandise, and completely shake up the system. The whole industry would come to a screeching hault. Same thing with the music industry - we need to simply stop attending big dollar concerts. Not forever, mind you, but for a season, a year, whatever. Trust me, if we did this, there would be definite changes made. I keep waiting for this but, alas, it never happens. In fact, consumers act like nothing is happening. It’s bizarre. We continue walking blindly along like we’re not getting screwed over around every corner.
And so, welcome to the world that we’ve created. Now how about we do something about it? Hello? Are you out there??!
In the meantime, I’m glad football took over as #1 and thank you fans for it. Baseball tickets have also gone up but they’re still at least semi-attainable…for now, at least.
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