'Hamilton' Scalpers Pocket $240k Every Week
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
My guess is it's something in the "that's just not the way it's done" family... Perhaps their venue controls ticket sales and doesn't care, or they have an intermediary like Ticketmaster who doesn't care. Or maybe it's more of a logistics concern, like they just think that doing such a thing would necessitate too big a change to entry procedure, likely slowing entry down too much? Or a more general logistics concern of they're not set up in person or online to do it that way, and changing now would be more trouble than it's worth?
They have to pretend to care to keep the public from rioting, but they clearly do not.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Giants-Web-site-facil...
Could there be something else stopping ticket sellers from doing the same?
edit: a word
Now, if you don't want to sit in front of your computer at 5am to buy tickets before they sell out, then the scalper is offering to do that for you for a price.
Why not auction all tickets, and if you want to give people the chance to see it for cheap, have lottery tickets which require ID?
How much money do staffing agencies, warehouses, ecommerce sites, and the entire middle man industry make each week?
I salute the ticket resellers. Thank you for creating a secondary market for tickets.
I strongly suspect they want it this way: promoters and performers like the aura of hard-to-get tickets, long lines, and sold-out shows. Plus, they can risk public derision and boycotts if they actually tried to sell at the market clearing price -- people are more tolerant of paying a big markup from some random guy for the exclusivity than buying it openly at the same huge markup from a faceless corporation.
Scalping was made legal in New York a few years ago, pushed by a legislative leader just sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribery and extortion.
The old law barred resale for profit, which kept scalping underground and prices under control.
Now you have conditions where a monopolist (Ticketmaster), who also operates a scalping^H "resale" site who (shockingly!) is having trouble stopping bulk buyers. I'm sure the usurious fees they earn on ticket purchase and resale encourages them to halt the process.
The industrial scalping market has effects all over the place. Good "Lion King" tickets in Schenectady, NY sold for $500 recently.
That makes absolutely no sense.
"It’s become such a problem that the show’s producers are considering almost doubling premium-priced "Hamilton” tickets to $995 to keep more of the profit for themselves, according to the New York Post."
By not allowing incredibly devoted fans to participate in an auction for tickets, they are actually making shows less accessible for the people who want it most. It's unfair that you can get to see a performance for $50 because you happened to get a ticket, but I am unable to even if I'm willing to pay $500.
The person who can only afford to pay $50 might consider it unfair that they can't get to see it just because you can afford to pay $500.
Tickets go on sale for $100, and 100 are bought by a single scalper for $10000. The scalper now needs to sell only 10 tickets at the market rate to break even. Since he only needs to sell 10, he starts by trying to sell them for $1500, knowing he'll initially have few sales, but that he can lower his price later if he needs to.
Now what you have is tickets being sold for $1500, and likely empty seats in the theater. The show is making 1/10 the income it might have made and won't be able to run as long, so even fewer people can see it.
The larger the margin between market rate and actual rate, the fewer people who will see it, the shorter the show will run, and the more expensive tickets will be for normal people.
The smart move is for the theatre to sell all tickets at a falling price: every day, tickets for the show on day X are cheaper than they were yesterday by an amount determined by how many tickets were sold. All seats will be sold at the market rate and scalpers have little margin to take.
Problem is that everyone wants to see the major stars and won't be as interested in a different cast. Or maybe they will. The touring show opens in Chicago this fall. We'll see.
It's in the shows interest (energy, PR, etc) to have all seats consistently full.
and THIS is why ticket scalpers suck. Literally the only options to see Hamilton any time this year are to pay ridiculous rates ($1000-2000 each for good seats) to a scalper, or enter the same-day lottery and pray.
I predict it's only going to get worse now that Hamilton has grabbed 16 Tony Award nominations (and is likely to win a truckload of them).
I bought tickets from Stubhub 2 months ago on the very low end of that range. And they were very good seats for a Saturday night show that I bought day of. I would have assumed that less good seats on other nights of the week would be much cheaper?
Or maybe prices have risen significantly in the last two months?
You might be able to find better prices for, e.g. a Sunday matinee when LMM isn't performing, I suppose.