Once again, Ticketmaster is at the heart of the old bait and switch scam. You have probably read about the State of New Jersey lawsuit against Ticketmaster, which accuses them of re-routing customers to ticket brokers for tickets with prices well above face value. Well, now they are perpetrating another scam with the whole notion of allowing consumers to buy "Pre-Sale" tickets.
Almost every above-average performer who plays at a medium to large venue allows fans to buy so-called "Pre-Sale" tickets. What Ticketmaster is doing is working out a deal with the ticket brokers to allow them access to the best seats for a fee. Ticketmaster feeds the brokers the "Pre-Sale Password" and lets them go to work gobbling up the best seats. If you are a normal Joe concert-goer and you have purchased the "Pre-Sale Password" from a fan website for $25 to $50, you are still going to be up against hundreds of brokers going after the same tickets, which makes your purchase of the password of very little value to you.
Does it ever make you wonder, when tickets go on sale to the general public, why you get what I call "outskirt" seats even though you logged in at 10:00am on the given sale date? This is completely due to this "Pre-Sale Scam" that Ticketmaster has been operating for the last few years.
Now on to my latest "Bait and Switch" tactic that happened to me last weekend. I managed to obtain the pre-sale password for a band playing at my local venue through a blog and, for fun, thought I would see how ticket prices were going one day before they went on sale to the general public. When I logged in and used the password, I was told that my best seats were going to be in the last section of the pavilion at the venue. I told myself that it was typical that the entire pavilion was likely to sell out before any seats went on sale to the general public, and I laughed out loud at the outrageousness of the whole ticketing process that Ticketmaster was providing.
Since the price of the pavilion tickets was double that of the lawn, I went ahead and bought 4 general admission lawn tickets because I simply wanted to take friends and see the show. Plus, sitting on the lawn is not all that bad unless it is raining. Anyway, a day went by and I logged into Ticketmaster to see how the general public ticket sales were coming along, and I noticed that the prices for the lawn seats were $12.30 lower per ticket than they were during the so-called "Pre-Sale"!
Seeing as this is a clear example of Bait and Switch, I called Ticketmaster and asked them a simple question: "Why do my tickets cost $12.30 less today than they did yesterday, and can I get a refund or credit?"
Their answer was that all ticket sales are final and that I was the one who chose to go through the pre-sale ticket process instead of waiting for the tickets to go on sale to the general public. No apology, no recognition of the fact that I have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on tickets through this monopoly over the years, nothing! It was my fault, they said, my fault that I bought the same ticket less than 24 hours earlier for $12.30 more per ticket. So for the 4 tickets that I bought, Ticketmaster scammed me out of $49.20. Think about how many others may have done the same thing.
So with that, we fans are going to have to pay the excessive venue charges and the excessive "in"-convenience charges, which end up making your overall ticket price approximately 40% more than the original ticket price. We are going to have to put up with this monopoly that takes advantage of the fact that bands can only make money touring and not by CD sales. They take advantage and scam each and every one of us with these practices.
I will end with one thing that the Ticketmaster customer service representative said that stuck with me. He tried to use an example, that if you bought a shirt from a store one day for $50 and it went on sale for $40 the next day, would that store give you $10 back? He said no, they would not. I know that stores follow that policy all of the time, and I felt that the man I had on the phone did not understand what it is to earn a buck and try to spend it wisely. I feel sorry for him and the life lesson that he will learn later when he realizes what a shameful company he works for.
Ticketmaster is a monopoly, Ticketmaster is a scam, and Ticketmaster is doing a disservice to everyone who is forced to use them to support music in this country. They are simply un-American.
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