I’ve had a gripe for many years that has only become stronger — ticket resellers.
To get one thing out of the way right away, ticket resellers do serve one very small purpose, which has even since been almost eliminated, and that is to resell tickets for people who can’t go to an event for one reason or another. However, ticket companies have introduced ways to resell your tickets on their platform in the last few years, essentially eliminating the one purpose ticket resellers had.
Here’s my problem. When you cannot buy a ticket for a show when they go on sale because a ticket reseller has bought a bunch of them up, that isn’t right. In doing so, now you have to go to the reseller site and pay even more in ridiculous fees on a ticket that was already stacked with ridiculous fees. Not only that, you are paying for the original taxes on it and the taxes on the increased price above the original for resale. It’s absolute malarky.
Every single person should have the opportunity to buy a ticket for any event themselves before a business buys them. Something needs to change in the legislation of this. Give the people a one week buffer or at least a day or two to buy them. Then sell them to the ticket resellers.
Ticket reseller companies would not exist in the abundance they do now or perhaps some would even completely go bankrupt if they were to change the rules. The rules should change. It’s an industry that is totally geared solely out of screwing the average person out of more money. It isn’t a “service” to them, it’s a theft. If they had to wait even a day to buy tickets to shows they think were popular, they wouldn’t be able to because actual persons, not businesses would have purchased the tickets at a semi-fair market rate.
It’s bad enough spending $20-40 on top of a ticket in fees to attend something, I don’t need an additional $30- 60 stacked on top of that from a reseller. Don’t even get me started on “dynamic pricing,” original fees charged on a ticket, and/or the cost of any sort of food or beverage at a place. People have been conditioned to be used to being price gouged, and it’s legally allowed. I’d like to at least stop the reseller scam with tickets.
If there is a legislator reading this, I very much encourage you to draft a bill and take it up at least with the state but preferably as a national law.
Needless to say, I have never bought a resale ticket from a ticket reseller.