Watching the “wait timer” on Ticketmaster’s website while trying to get World Series tickets is an excercise in futility. It reminds me of watching the ridiculous scale on “The Biggest Loser,” where the weight allegedly fluctuates in this enormous range to add to the suspense. Same with the stupid timer, which indicates initially that your wait time is “approximately 15 minutes or more.” Forty-three minutes later, it still says “approximately 15 minutes or more” despite the fact that 5 minutes ago, it said “6 minutes or more” and it has been as low as “3 minutes or more.”
Now, the cheapest tickets to these games are $75 for standing room – $75 to stand amongst the drunks, getting elbowed for 3 hours. I’ll be curious to find out what they fetch on e-Bay. There are also a handful of $90 tickets in the upper-upper-deck on the LF side of the park. After that, ticket prices skyrocket to $175 for bleacher seats. The rest of the tickets fall within a narrow range, between $190 and $250.
Knowing what we know about ticket prices, and what they fetch on the grey market every year for every big sporting event, $250 sounds way too cheap. They are already going for $800/pair or more on eBay. There are alot of people out there willing to pay more than $250 for the seats, but couldn’t because they were subjected to MLB’s quequeing system. Why MLB seems happy to funnel the surplus to the ticket brokers and resellers, instead of capturing as much of it as possible, is beyond me.
Would it be cool to get these tickets for less than they’re clearly worth? Yeah, hell yeah it would. Of course it would. But there simply isn’t a justifiable argument for putting people in line when what is really happening is a lottery. If you don’t request the right number of tickets, in the right section, you go right back to the end of the line to start over again.
What’s more, is this: those fortunate bastards who only paid $90 (less than the market demand) for the skyline seats, were able to abscond with my consumer surplus. When really the only necessary and sufficient condition to getting these tickets is luck, it’s clearly an inefficient process. I would rather know, without a doubt, that I can’t buy tickets because the cheapest ones are $300 a piece, than be subject to the illusion of the possibility of acquiring tickets if only I log onto ticketmaster right at 10, cross my fingers, hold my toungue, and get really, really lucky. The problems here are just like any other scheme of price control:
There is no qualitative difference between the haves and the have nots. Failure to set the ticket prices approximately equal to market prices results in a black market, with loss of consumer & producer surplus. And although black markets tend to pick up some of the slack, there is a loss of efficiency, and there is no justifiable argument from equity.
Where’s my consumer surplus?
With the ticketbrokers. Thanks, MLB. You keep coming up with reasons to hate you.