Few months back when the tickets went on sale, my friends and I decided we'll go for it, being a big The Killers fan and all. Assuming that one of my friends was gonna handle the ticket purchases, I just left the matter for her to handle and went about my daily routines.
Couple of weeks ago, my friend casually asked me, so have you gotten your tickets yet? Mine just came in the mail yesterday.
And I'm like, what?? You didn't get my share of tickets?
Annoyed and worried, I went online to try to buy my share of tickets but turned out, within that couple of weeks, the tickets were already sold out!! I was pretty depressed for a couple of days, I contemplated flying to the UK to watch their concert, which they just put on yesterday. But later my friend told me about this thing called Maketplace on Ticket Master(I'm from Singapore so I'm new to Ticket Master). I guess I didn't mind paying a little more if it would mean I get to hear The Killers Read My Mind. Thing is, other people were selling their tickets at a marked up price of 197.50$! The original cost of a ticket is only 42.50 by the way. Indeed, I mentioned I wouldn't mind paying a little more but 197.50? I could take that money, top up a little more, fly myself to England, be with my best friends and still watch The Killers perform. Mind you, 197.50 is not the highest price on the market, there are certain crazy people selling the tickets at 300$. So with that, I slept on it and I have been thinking about how desperate I wanted to watch The Killers, versus buying myself a new pair of shoes, for the past couple of weeks.
Low and behold, earlier, while trying to study for my math midterm(yeah, at the end of term), I found a number of black marketeers online! Tickets ranging from 75-300$. They have the goods, I am the demand, they are the (illegal) sellers, I will be the buyer. Everybody's happy! The good thing is that, no bidding is involved in this sales. It works on a first come first serve basis and I found myself 4 tickets at a low price of 69$! And although I don't need all 4 tickets, I'm going to buy them all anyways and then resell them later because I want to recover my lost of 26.50$/ticket, I'm just bitter that way. So anybody who wants to go watch The Killers on 5th May? I'm your girl. I plan to market my tickets at 100$.
Because the box office often times price their tickets too low at PBO, whereas the market-clearing price is at P*. And therefore, there is an excess demand of tickets, which effects a secondary market.
These ticket resellers purchase a lot of the tickets at the low box office price and then meet the demands of those purchasers willing to pay higher prices for those same tickets.
Maybe this is why resale price maintenance exist, to erase ticket scalpers like us.
Your blog reminds me of Tuesday night. Tuesday I went to the bluejackets game and we encountered so many scalpers! From the moment we parked in the garage there were people outside either trying to sell us tickets at an outrageous price, or there were people standing around asking us if we had extra tickets. Its just crazy to me how much people will pay or what they will do if their demand for the tickets is really high.
ReplyDelete