Features
Supply And Supply?
The secondary market gets a lot of flak for offering tickets to hot events at what often amounts to incredibly marked-up prices. But it’s not as often that the lowest prices on the secondary market are examined, as was the case with a recent Forbes opinion piece by Steve Pociask of the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research.
Pociask took Ticketmaster and the NFL to task for setting arbitrary price floors on tickets sold on TM’s Ticket Exchange, which keeps fans from unloading tickets at a discount.
The piece used the lackluster Jacksonville Jaguars as an example. In cases like this, Pociask explained, fans looking to catch a game at an affordable price can win, as tickets “on some secondary market websites are selling for less than face value. Sellers and buyers are both better off from the transaction.”
But those looking for a deal might want to avoid Ticket Exchange, where the Jaguars apparently don’t allow tickets to be resold for less than $35. Compare this to a site such as StubHub, where tickets for some late-season home games were available at press time for as little as $21. Nearly each NFL team has a price floor for tickets, undisclosed to the purchaser.
TM and the NFL have marketed Ticket Exchange as the “safe” way to purchase on the secondary market, but they’ve also concealed the fact that price floors are being set, Pociask claims, which he says is disingenuous at best.
“The fact is that there is nothing more consumer-friendly than cheap tickets,” he wrote. “When teams collude to fix prices with online resellers, consumers are the losers in the deal.”