Check the breakdown of a recent purchase I made:
- Price of tickets as advertised: $20
- Convenience Charge: $8.35
- Additional Taxes: $0.42
- Order Processing Fee: $5.62
- TOTAL: $34.39
Are you kidding me? it cost me $14.39 just to buy a fucking $20 ticket? Does anyone else see an issue with that? Why the hell didn't they just tell me the ticket cost $30. It would be a lot easier to swallow a $5 service fee on a $30 order, then a $15 fee on a $20 order.
Can you imagine? Go to buy some coffee at Starbucks, sure the cost of the coffee is $2.00 but there is a $1.00 line fee for waiting in line, plus tax, plus a convenience fee because Starbucks has so many locations... no one would stand for it. Stop calling it a $20 ticket and call it what it is, highway robbery, bait and switch, bad business practices, worth walking to the venue to see if they sell the tickets at the window.
If anyone knows how to cut Ticketmaster out of my event transactions I'll gladly entertain that idea.
No fucking kidding, it is about as disgusting as rape - because that what it is really and nobody can tell me that a 70% markup on a piece of paper that no value has been added to is not rape. What they are doing used to be called scalping. As it is, I'm sure they have calculated how much it would cost to actually drive downtown from some outlying area, pay for parking and purchase the tickets from the box office (which is what you literally have to do to cut them out of the equation) and realize that - because there is somehow mysteriously nobody else to compete with them in providing their service - that is how much they can gouge us for. Smells a lot like what happens when there is a monopoly - and obviously the service charge would not be nearly so high in a competitive market situation. The truth of the matter is that most of that extra $14.39 the market is bearing does not belong to the scalpers who are getting it just because they have managed to get their hands on all the tickets - it belongs the the people that are actually struggling to bring us the entertainment (i.e. the artists and the venues). So please die and go to hell Ticketmaster - that money does not belong to you!!
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