The Springsteen Ticket Snafu

It's great that everyone's making such a fuss about Ticketmaster's handling of ticket sales for the upcoming Bruce Springsteen shows in the Meadowlands. Still, there's one key question no one seems to be asking.

Why do they put tickets on sale at 9 a.m. on a Monday in the first place?
 
Think about it: The kids are in school and most people lucky enough to have jobs have just settled in for the start of a work week. If they work in an office, they have no business sitting at their computers waiting to get through to Ticketmaster. And if they work on a construction crew or in a truck or at a cash register or in a kitchen they don't even have access to a computer.
 
Still something like 30,000 tickets to the May 21 and 23 shows sold out in just over an hour, according to the Star-Ledger. Who had the luxury of buying those seats? The unemployed? I doubt it -- not at $65 and $95 (plus all those awful extra charges). The idle rich? Sorry, they left town months ago.
 
No, the people who got those seats were those who were willing to cheat their employers out of the time it took to make the purchase. Or those kids who cut class. Or those self-employed who lost valuable time to play the Ticketmaster game. (If you've ever logged on to buy tickets, you know what I mean.)
 
And then there were the professional ticket buyers, now known as resellers, but formerly known as scalpers. They have teams of people who grab up tickets that will be resold at higher prices through the secondary market.
 
Really, how dumb is this? How hard would it have been to put those tickets on sale at 8 pm Monday -- when the majority of fans (and all the kids) would be at home and able to use their own time attempting to get through the digital queue?
 
Yes, it's wrong for Ticketmaster to redirect consumers to buy more expensive, secondary market tickets, as they have acknowledged doing. But isn't it just as insensitive to ignore the needs of the students and working people who should be at the core of the Springsteen audience? It's cynical and stupid, but typical of the way the arrogant Ticketmaster treats its customers.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Tags: Meadowlands | Bruce Springsteen,

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