Home > Gwinnett.talk > Archives > 2007 > September > 17
Monday, September 17, 2007
What’s the trick?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Handout
Jim Costelloe
3, 1461, 220-6400, 1. What do these numbers mean? No, they are not related to the sequence of numbers from “Lost.” They are actually even more puzzling.
•3 — as in three websites of so-called ticket brokers I looked at Monday morning after Hannah Montana tickets went on sale Saturday. These scalp — um, I mean, brokers — were Peachtreetickets.com, Razorgator.com (also known as Encore Tickets) and Smoothtickets.com.
•1461 — as in 1,461 — the total number of tickets these three websites (combined) had and were “selling” for the Hannah Montana concert coming to Gwinnett Center Arena in November.
•220-6400 — as in $220 to $6,400 — the price range that these tickets are selling for on these websites.
•1 — as in one family out of about 30 that we know who was actually able to get tickets to the Hannah Montana concert through the conventional means of trying to buy them through the online pre-sale as a member of Hannah’s fan club, or trying to buy them on the official sale date on Saturday morning, Sept.15.
I have puzzled over how these “brokers,” aptly named because buying tickets through these places will leave a family broke, are able to suck up the lion’s share of tickets while the vast majority of the non-broker population gets left empty-handed.
Think about these numbers, as they are truly staggering. These three places were each able to get their hands on hundreds of tickets. (There are other web sites with Hannah tickets, too; these are just the ones I checked.) That is an astounding success rate considering that there are limits on the number of tickets that can be purchased at one time, and knowing that most families with a child in the 7-10-year-old range living in Georgia were also online, on the phone or in line trying to accomplish the same thing the brokers were. I would think the odds would be stacked against the brokers.
People I know who attempted to buy tickets during the pre-sale were shut out instantly, within seconds of hitting enter on their keyboards. These same people then tried again by either attempting to purchase tickets online, by phone and by standing in line, still to no avail. People who stood in line saw that no line ever made it past the second person before being told that all the tickets were gone.
So what gives brokers such a leg up? These places can’t be sending employees into the street to wait in line with the rest of us. That wouldn’t make sense. Ticketmaster’s lottery system would not guarantee them a high enough success rate to make it profitable.
For those who do not know, the lottery system means you don’t have to camp out over night to be first in line. If tickets go on sale at 10 a.m., the outlet will hold a drawing about 9-9:30 a.m. for those people waiting to determine the order of people buying tickets. Therefore, it makes no difference if you arrive three minutes or three days before the drawing, your chances are the same.
So what could brokers be doing to gain such an enormous upper hand?
In some cases, it appears they may have technology. According to a lawsuit filed by Ticketmaster LLC in Los Angeles, four individuals in Massachusetts used sophisticated technology to circumvent Ticketmaster’s security protocols and flood the retailer with potentially hundreds of requests using multiple credit cards and E-mail addresses. The four accused individuals are alleged to have bought more than 45,000 tickets since 2003.
Other lawsuits filed in Texas, Ohio and Illinois allege that similar technology was used there to purchase 120,000 tickets in the same time span.
Of course there isn’t a single broker out there who doesn’t insist it obtains its ridiculous inventory of tickets through proper and legal channels. Go to any of these websites, and you will read essentially the same line: We obtain our tickets by maintaining extensive contacts with season ticket holders and by purchasing tickets from individual ticket purchasers.
The only problem with this stale rhetoric is that there are no season ticket holders for Hannah Montana concerts, and it would be literally impossible to obtain the number of tickets these brokers advertise from individual purchasers, let alone have them posted to their website within minutes of the concert selling out.
Maybe it’s time to go back to the old-fashioned method of selling tickets at retail outlets only and eliminating the online purchase. At least it would level the playing a field a bit more.
In the meantime, nothing changes, and our children get a first-hand lesson in disappointment.
At least we can take comfort in the fact that our children are not alone in their misery while the scalp — oops again, I mean, brokers — make money from it.
Jim Costelloe is a husband and father of two who lives in Suwanee and works in the commercial mortgage industry.
Permalink | Comments (13) | Post your comment | Categories: Entertainment
Lieutenant governor comes to Gwinnett again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Casey Cagle came to Lawrenceville 10 days ago to check out the county’s new Animal Welfare and Enforcement Center.
In 12 days he’ll be back to talk to Gwinnett chamber members about his efforts “to make Georgia a state where every single citizen, regardless of their current circumstances, can achieve the American dream.”
That doesn’t sound like the typically wonkish fare the chamber serves up at its regularly scheduled chicken dinners. Gee, you think Cagle might be making the rounds, albeit a tad early, for a possible run for governor in 2010?
Two visits do not a campaign make, and while Cagle has acknowledged he’s interested in the top job, he cautioned tea leaf readers against looking for “gov” in all the wrong places.
Nonetheless, it kind of reminds us of the string of visits Sonny Perdue made to Gwinnett before his re-election in 2006. We haven’t heard much from him since.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Gwinnett Insider
